A Crystal Heart's Easy to Break, Baby
by The Qing
Summary: An unwelcome and Dandy face from Pearl's past returns in pursuit of a rare and terrible menace that could spell the end of Beach City. Unfortunately for her, Steven thinks that he's a pretty cool guy. A hilarious and heartbreaking Space Adventure in Space on Earth. Steven Universe/Space Dandy crossover.
1. The Alien Hunters

**Chapter 1: The Alien Hunters**

_Space is big, I guess._

_Actually, that's something of a fact depending on where you sit. With the right chair, anything can look small from a seated position. For instance, if you were to take the perspective of a blockhead bounty hunter and his pinhead robot sidekick/partner/slave/sponsor who were lazily whittling away the minutes in a clunky, but inexplicably functional, space ship, then Space was quite large indeed. The two and their vessel were little more than infinitesimal specks aimlessly roaming the infinite. And they knew it._

_What they gleaned from this daunting bit of knowledge was that it took them a while to get anywhere._

_Thankfully, that meant that there wasn't much room for many surprises. Destitute as they were, they owned tools that made it seem like the gears of the celestial engine moved at a decrepit and observable pace along with its flecks of paint and rust. Barring the abrupt occurrence of a cataclysmic space wedgie where all of existence would simply decide to call it quits, there was no menace that wasn't easy to circumvent, no dying sun they couldn't gingerly back away from, no piece of projectile junk they couldn't dodge. If they wanted to get somewhere or get away from somewhere, they could, lightyears be damned. As far as they were concerned, while space was indeed large, its enormity was less intimidating as it was mildly inconvenient. Provided everything worked as it should and didn't explode in their faces of course._

_Where they were at the moment perfectly exemplified the miniscule, but adept position of any interstellar traveller worth his or her salt; travelling through a wide open stretch of pure distance, far from any planet, sun, or space station. It was one of the ever-expanding gulfs of in-between, a void's void. On the downside, it was very much like the high-concept equivalent of standing in a moderately long and cold queue where you were 5 persons away from what you were after. On the upside, they didn't have to worry about being blasted out of the blue by pirates trying to board their ship or twitchy planetary defenses misfiring in their direction. They'd be able to spot them coming miles upon miles away and flee accordingly. The only threat they could face here, besides the aforementioned wedgie that would kill everyone too quickly for them to care, was if something were to warp where they were. This was ludicrously unlikely. There were in the middle of nowhere; no one would have anything to gain from making this their destination. _

_That didn't stop 20 tons of twisted, gnashing implausibility from doing so regardless._

_An enormous pink flash preceded its abrupt arrival, and it was only through the twosome's quick thinking that a collision was avoided. It streaked past them, causing their ship to be sent tumbling by the force of this near-miss. The cockpit was transformed into a dizzying, twirling jumble of sleazy magazines, half-eaten snacks, and rusty power tools with its two occupants thrown in the mix. Luckily, robots don't actually get dizzy in so much as they enjoy making "whoah-whoah-whoah" sounds when the opportunity presents itself and soon the controls were in a chubby, metal grip that managed to make just the right yanking motions to get everything to stop spinning._

"_Owww…took your time, didn't you?"_

_The robot snorted, a gesture of spite made all the more calculated given that it did not have a nose. "You're welcome, Dandy."_

"_Cut the sass, QT." Dandy groaned, fighting off nausea as he tried to get back on his feet. "What the hell was that thing?"_

_As if in answer, there was a brief flicker of pink on the left side of the solar windshield._

"_Gone apparently." QT shrugged with his hands. "It just warped somewhere else."_

_Dandy groaned, still unable to get vertical with everything still swaying back and forth in his eyes. "Did you at least get a good look at it with those fancy cameras of yours? Maybe a license plate so we can track him down and sue?"_

_QT's digital pinprick eyes contorted into twin hourglasses as he searched his memory for images of the object that had sent them spiraling out of control, "Oh yeah, it did have a license plate, several in fact. Along with a bunch of wires, burnt-out lightbulbs, rusty cans, half a bulldozer, what I think might be the chassis of a luxury sedan, and that's only what I could make out." He fought back the base programming that told him to hunt down that mobile mess of a meteor and make it clean. Sometimes, a robot had to pick its battles._

"_So we nearly got run over by a flying junkyard? The nerve of some dumps." Dandy had given up on trying to stand and had opted to crawl back into his chair instead. Once seated, things started to stabilize ever so slightly, and he tentatively brought a hand to his hair to see if everything was still in place. To his irritation, the regent pompadour he usually sported had been awkwardly squashed to the side. Thankfully his comb had managed to stay in his pocket during the tumble. With practiced care, he took it out and went about restoring his pomp to its former glory._

_Having performed this act of cosmetic maintenance countless times, he required no mirror or too much concentration to do his 'do properly. He decided to take a look around as he did so to pass the time and hopefully chase away his remaining disorientation. QT was running diagnostics, no doubt fearing that something vital that prevented the Aloha-Oe from exploding had been jostled; The bridge was a mess and he didn't even want to imagine what all that spinning had done to the pantry and his collectibles, but he could always get QT to clean that up later; Then he looked out the window and saw that the stars had remained largely the same, proving that they hadn't been knocked too far off course. _

"_How much longer until we get to the buffet?" Dandy asked._

"_It'll probably take another hour or so. But just give me a minute to make sure that everything's in working order." QT replied._

"_All right, but I'm counting down the seconds." Dandy replied as he put the finishing touches on his hair. "And don't even think about suggesting we war-hello, what is that?"_

"_What's what?"_

_Dandy didn't answer. Instead he put his comb aside and grabbed a small, rectangular box from under the control panel. He began to manipulate the twin joysticks protruding from its surface, causing a long telescopic metal claw to slither into the cockpit's view._

"_What are you using the claw for?" QT asked as the tube-like appendage stretched further into what appeared to be star-specked nothingness._

"_Keep your wheels on…almost got it." The plate-tipped pincers gently clamped down. A few careful tugs of the control pad later, and the claw withdrew just enough so that the ship's two occupants could see what it had retrieved._

_QT didn't believe it. Between the steel hold of the claw was a large, pale, oval-shaped gemstone. "Wow. How did you manage to spot that from so far away?"_

_Dandy clicked his tongue disapprovingly. "You know me, QT. I'm an old pro at spotting booty of all kinds."_

_His robot companion fumed at having given him yet another chance to congratulate himself. It's not like he was incapable of finding grounds to do so every other hour. Still, QT had to admit that it was a mildly impressive feat. The stone was pretty small as far as space rocks went and probably wouldn't have shown up on their radar. Even if it had managed to reflect some light amongst all this darkness, it could easily have been mistaken for just another faraway star or planet to the untrained or uncaring eye._

_He'd snap his own motherboard in half before ever saying such to him though._

"_Yeah, you sure are." QT conceded lamely._

"_Damn straight." Dandy smiled. "Now let's bring this puppy in. I think we might be able to sell it for a pretty penny."_

_The robot tilted slightly forward on his wheels as a kind of nod and made preparations to open the airlock. "Maybe we can buy back those seatbelts we pawned off!" he offered excitedly._

"_Why would we waste our money on something like that?" Dandy scoffed as he had the claw deposit the gem into the open hatch._

_QT quickly glanced at a new tear on one of Dandy's sleeves and a small dent on his own curvy frame that wasn't there 15 minutes ago. "You're right. What was I thinking?"_

_After Dandy had safely deposited the stone into the ship, the two quickly got it out of the airlock and brought it with them to the ship's lounge, feeling immensely pleased with themselves all the way._

_Dandy gave it a quick, sloppy kiss, all ready imagining the hypothetical riches it would get him. "Cute, little thing, ain't it?" he observed as he held the gem up to the light._

"_My scanners say that it's a giant pearl." QT said. "I wonder how it ended up way out here in space."_

"_Maybe there's a giant clam out there that we can get registered." Dandy mused, turning the pearl in his hands as he did so. "Or if it's not rare, we could always have it for dinner." _

"_Oysters, Dandy. Oysters are the ones that make pearls." QT corrected. "And quit shaking it. You might drop the gem and lower its market value!"_

"_I-I'm not doing this!" Dandy cried. The stone kept shaking, more violently than before, and Dandy tried to keep a hold of it by bringing his other hand to bear. "Hold still, you little-," was about as far as he got when it finally shot out of his grip._

_QT's arms stretched out to catch the stone as it sailed past, but its vibrating thwarted any attempt to grab it. Now, unimpeded by man and robot alike, the pearl did as physics decreed and clattered to the ground._

_Its would-be owners quickly rushed to the fallen gem, questions about why it had wrenched itself from Dandy's grip were pushed aside by far more important inquiries like, 'Did it get scratched?', 'Was it cracked?', and 'Can we still sucker someone into paying top dollar for it if yes was the answer to one or both of the previous questions?' To their relief, they saw no visible fractures of any sort on the pearl's surface. It seemed that this gem wasn't as fragile as either of them feared._

"_Hah!" Dandy smirked, turning to face QT. "And you were worried about me dropping i-."_

_The pearl erupted in a brilliant and enormous blaze of light._

_But since Dandy and QT were looking at one another at the time, they were only half-blinded._

* * *

><p>"Are you sure this will work?" Steven asked Pearl as she made another practice swing with her spear.<p>

Pearl grumbled something about how her thumb slipped before replying, "Oh you don't have to worry about that, Steven. I've all ready crunched the numbers and everything's set up, so all I need to do now is get my stance right and we should be good to go."

"HEY!" Amethyst shouted from higher up the cliff. "IS SHE DONE YET? TELL HER TO GET DONE FASTER!"

Steven nodded, though he wasn't sure if Amethyst could see him do so. It was a pretty dark night after all. "She's asking if you're done."

"No need for that, I heard it too." Pearl said absentmindedly. "Just need to get the left shoulder a twinge higher and straighten the knees a little. Hmmm, Steven, please tell Amethyst that you can't rush these things."

"WHAT DID SHE SAY?!" Amethyst asked.

"She said that you're doing a great job and that she's almost done!" Steven replied.

"OH, OKAY!" Amethyst said, believing the quasi-lie. "IT'S JUST THAT MY ARMS ARE GETTING KINDA SORE! ASK GARNET IF SHE WANTS TO TRADE PLACES WITH ME!"

"Absolutely not." Pearl said. "I'd have to recalculate this entire maneuver if she did."

"Plus," Garnet said from her position. "I kind of want to be the projectile this time."

At that, Steven decided to take another glance at what the Gems had been building for the last five minutes. Amethyst had created an extremely long elastic whip, the end of which had been tied around the town lighthouse. After making sure that Amethyst was dug in enough so that she wouldn't fall off the hill (again), Garnet had leaned against the length of it, before leaping off of the edge and then planting her feet firmly into the cliff wall just a foot shy from the ground itself. It was a weirdly practical set-up as far as the Gems were concerned; using their environment to form an enormous faux slingshot. Steven thought it looked like getting launched out of it would be fun if Amethyst's whip wasn't still loaded with thorns, Pearl needing to smack the loaded individual to give them the added boost needed to fire themselves high in the sky instead of being grounded to paste by a stone wall, and how the person send up there would have to fight a monster rapidly descending from space that (according to Garnet) 'totally wants to smash into Beach City' and eat everyone there.

From behind him, there was a sharp, swift sound of air being sliced, followed by a vibrant cry of triumph. "Yes!" Pearl sauntered past Steven and was so relaxed and confident, that you'd swear she didn't know about the alien menace about to crash into them all within the next few minutes.

As she got behind Garnet and began to adjust her posture, Steven couldn't help but wonder if Pearl using her weapon for this was the best idea. "Are you sure that using your spear won't hurt Garnet when you hit her with it? I could get some golf clubs from my dad's shed!" he suggested.

Garnet, whose gaze had been sternly fixed at her distant target, turned her head toward Steven. "Can you do that in less than three minutes?"

"No." Steven said sadly.

"It's all right, Steven." Pearl assured him as she rotated her torso and arms into a finely practiced back-swing, the grip on her weapon firm and expertly placed. "I'm just using the back of the blade for this." And then she swung.

It was almost too fast for Steven to register. One moment Pearl had positioned herself to deliver the coveted blow and the next she was poised in a perfect follow-through whose subtleties were lost on Steven due to his limited experiences with actual golf. Fortunately, the results were much easier to appreciate: the whip and Garnet snapped upward in a near instant, kicking up a swath of mineral detritus from the cliff face in their wake. In little more than a second, the bands fell away from her and she was over the cliff and the lighthouse like a red-and-black blur of a missile fired into the starlit sky, becoming little more than a barely recognizable speck the further she went.

Steven, Amethyst, and Pearl looked up after their friend, wondering if this daring, but calculated, gambit would work out. A bright crimson flash, an explosion of dust, and the thunderous booming of a massive collision overhead did little to ease these fears; Pearl suddenly realized that she hadn't factored in the unwelcome, if unlikely possibility that Garnet might crash through an airplane or two on her way to dealing with the threat. Mercifully, a titanic pained roar of something most definitely not of this world temporarily overpowered the tranquil night sounds of Beach City. The soothing notes of the tide gently rolling across the shore and the simple sporadic melodies of nocturnal insects gave way to an immense agonized shriek that would have the unsuspecting townsfolk still awake reeling in terrified confusion.

For Steven and the Gems, it was music to their ears; indicative of a crisis averted made all the sweeter by their spotting what had to be the defeated opponent hurdling far away from where they were to sink into the ocean. Garnet would never allow herself to fall in such a wild and clumsy way after all, and to their added relief, something solid and whole fell from the sky a moment later in a controlled arc. They saw it hit the waters across the Temple's gaze with such precision and purpose that it barely made a splash. Amethyst, who had the best view of the event and its aftermath from her spot on the hill, yelled to her companions below that she could see someone swimming towards them from where the object had landed.

Pearl grinned. Everything had worked out after all. Why wouldn't it? Having known what was coming and given time to plan, success was the only reasonable outcome. Garnet had even come out of it in one piece and near the Temple so she wouldn't have to travel so far after it was over. Again, just as calculated. She called out to Amethyst that it was time to leave, getting a loud tired grunt in response. Recalling her spear with one hand, she beckoned Steven to follow her as she began to walk home.

Steven started to follow her along the coast, but stopped to spare a glance at the stars above. Whatever had been trying to reach Beach City had definitely not been friendly, and neither had the last thing to come down from there. Finding out what the Gems were and how they weren't really from Earth may have proved that they weren't alone in the universe, but everything out there just seemed to be so angry and hostile. As he made his way toward the temple steps, he wondered if outer space was as great as Pearl made it out to be; if there was anything remotely friendly beyond their world that could come and visit for once.

* * *

><p>"I'm still a little sore from last night, what about you?" Amethyst asked, giving her left bicep a slight rub to see if there was any pain left in it.<p>

"A tiny bit." Garnet lied. "You should see the other guy."

Amethyst had to giggle at that. Cramped as her arms were from having to carry her whip, Garnet, and pretty much the entirety of Pearl's crazy scheme, they were probably faring a lot better than the face of that freak of nature the Amazing Flying Garnet had smashed. "No kidding. I couldn't see most of what went down, but it sounded like you really gave that creep a pounding."

Her taller friend nodded in response. "So where do you think Steven ran off to?" she asked, slowing her gait to give the passing buildings and streets some brief, but intense scrutiny.

"I dunno." Amethyst casually answered, simply glad that Garnet's slower pace meant that she had to take less steps to keep up with her. "I lost track of him an hour ago. Why?"

Garnet shrugged. "We did tell Pearl that we were going to watch over him."

"And we did," Amethyst said. "For about five minutes." She caught Garnet giving her what was probably a mildly disapproving glance behind her sunglasses. "Oh don't look at me like that! He'll be fine, he always is. Besides, it was the only way she'd let us out of the temple without nagging at us."

"True." Garnet admitted. Despite how well they had done against whatever it was she pulverized the previous night, Pearl had insisted they put in a few dozen hours into preparing for the next time something like it tried to slam into their home. "But we are going to have to do it eventually. Why not now?"

Amethyst stroked her chin as if she was giving the matter some serious thought. "Hmmm, let me think, beautiful day or stare at a hologram of some butt-ugly beast until Pearl gets sick of it? Tough choice." She threw up her arms in mock frustration. "If it's going to happen anyway, I'd much rather it did when it's raining or when that mayor guy throws one of his dumb parades."

"That's fair."

Relieved that Garnet wasn't going to change her mind, fetch Steven, and drag them all back home, Amethyst realized there was something that she had meant to ask all morning. "Was it really that ugly?"

"Exactly that ugly." Garnet replied. "I kind of liked it."

"Ewwww." Amethyst half-wretched, half-laughed.

"Not like that." Garnet corrected. "It was just a nice change of pace." Her voice suddenly became quiet. "Considering that it wasn't even a Gem."

"That's what I'm talking about." Amethyst pumped her fists in the air. "We need some variety in the things we beat up!" She had expected Garnet to make a curt sound of agreement or no auditory reply at all. What she hadn't expected, was the slobbering.

She quickly turned to face Garnet who shook her head. It hadn't been her. The taller Gem then pointed ahead towards an intersection and wagged her finger toward the right. They quickly made their way around the bend to see what was causing such a loud and disgusting noise. That's when they saw the giant cat.

Perhaps calling it a giant cat was a bit of an oversimplification. It had the whiskers, the white fur, the slinky tail, and the grey paws that you'd find on any normal feline, but everything else about it looked wrong. Cats, however large they were, didn't have pear shaped forms and long necks that ended with heads too small for their bodies that had eyes too large for their heads. These peculiarities were so distracting that they only noticed that it was wearing a pair of orange crocs, a pistachio vest, a gold bracelet, and a red hat with a small, yellow smiley face logo at its center after it had taken out its cellphone.

"Oh man, they weren't kidding when they said the Salmon-Anchovie was the best thing on the menu." It said in between scarfing down pizza slices with a voice that was weaselly, but distinctly male. "melp dot com rules! I gotta chweet about this place."

Well it could talk, and in English no less, but despite it now being very clear to them that they could communicate with it, the Gems were unsure as to how to engage this unknown entity. If it had been hostile, perhaps attacking the Fish Stew Pizza restaurant behind him in a feral rage, then what they'd need to do would be all too clear. However, with it just sitting on the curb as it slurped up cheese and played with its phone, this was a variety of first contact they hadn't encountered in a while. Finally, after about a minute of watching (and hearing) him chweet and eat, it was Amethyst who broke the dribble-tinged stalemate.

"Uh." She said uncertainly.

"Hm?" The cat thing's ears-Amethyst just noticed that there seemed to be four of them around the sides of his face-perked up and it turned to face the two of them. "Yeah?"

"What are you?" Garnet asked tersely.

"Oh this?" the cat thing pointed to the folded pizza in the claw not holding the smart phone. "Oh this used to be a pizza, but I folded it, so now it's kind of like a calzone." He licked his lips, all ready anticipating his next bite. "And a pretty dang good one, too. Thanks again, Mr. Fish!" he shouted towards the store behind him.

"Stop loitering outside my store, cat!" Koffi Pizza yelled from inside his restaurant, apparently uncaring that his most recent customer hadn't been human.

Said bestial patron gave the shop and its owner a mild glare that went unnoticed by Koffi since he was quite occupied with cleaning up a large trail of dander that seemed to start at the register and end at the door. The creature briefly wondered if some shedding stray had wandered in when he hadn't been looking. "Oh that's gonna cost him a star." He grumbled as he gobbled up another mouthful of pizza. Despite his best efforts to maintain his frown, the sublime flavors of the morsel quickly lifted his spirits. "Okay….maybe just half a star." He said in a manner he thought magnanimous, but to the Gems, appeared to be more conceited than anything else. Then he turned his long neck to face them once more. "So does that answer your question?"

"She meant what are you, dude? You're a giant cat! What's up with that?" Amethyst demanded, having wrested her tongue away from the metaphorical cat to direct it at the material one.

"I'm not a cat!" the cat-like being snapped. "I'm a Betelgeusian! And you're one to talk with your purple skin and that gem in your cleav-GEM?!" the Betelgeusian recoiled in horror, finally noticing the violet crystal lodged in Amethyst chest. It cocked its frightened head to the side to see that yes, Garnet had crystals of her own as well. "Ahehe, you-you guys wouldn't happen to be Garnet and Amethyst, would you?"

"How do you know our names?" Amethyst asked.

The Betelgeusian gave a nervous chuckle. "Ah, there's no need to get creeped out, Garnet."

"I'm Garnet." Garnet corrected.

"Whoops." The Betelgeusian gulped. "Sorry about that. Dandy was pretty vague about which was which."

Amethyst was pretty sure she couldn't remember anyone called Dandy, and with a name as strange as that she certainly would have. "Dandy?"

"F-forget I said anything. It's nothing-nothing!" The Betelgeusian waved a greasy paw as if to swat away the name. "Certainly not something you'd need to tell…which one of you is the worrywart of the bunch?"

"Pearl." Garnet and Amethyst answered simultaneously.

"Right, that one. My friends and I, who have zero history with any of you, are just a bunch of alien hunters who came here chasing a Slammerhead. Seen one of those by the way? Big, angry, winged, teal thing with a giant slab for a skull?" he brought the pizza box up to his face to give a rough approximation of what he was talking about. "Might've tried to kamikaze your town."

"I punched it." Garnet stated.

This caused the Betelgeusian to back away slightly. "Is it dead?"

Amethyst shrugged. "It sank into the ocean. So I'm guessing yeah."

"Dang, more work for us I guess." The alien hunter cursed. "At least we know it's probably nearby."

"What?"

"I'm telling you guys, it doesn't matter." He tried to assure them to no effect. "Besides, I'm sure you're all super busy with your Gem stuff. So I'll be going now. But before I leave…" the Betelgeusian put down the pizza box and gingerly pushed it in their direction. When he didn't get a reaction from either Gem, he gave it an additional, less subtle push.

"Are you trying to bribe us with this?" Amethyst winced.

"What? Bribe?! No-no-no, you've got it all wrong. I'm just implying-." He had his tail clumsily push it even closer to the pair. "-That if you're eating this awesome pizza, then you'll be too preoccupied to go to the Beach or tell Pearl anything about this little encounter. So you should probably do that. There's even a complimentary packet of chilli flakes in there!" the Betelgeusian gave a very cat-like smile, before standing up from the sidewalk, picking up a second box of pizza with him as he did so, this one unopened. "Well it was nice meeting you guys. Bye!" he waved to them briefly before running the other direction on his hind, shoed legs.

The Gems watched his strange, inexplicable retreat until he vanished around a corner.

"So…should we tell Pearl?" Garnet asked, only to be answered by a sound of absolute disgust from Amethyst.

"There are 2 and a half slices left in this thing and they're all covered in cat hair!" Amethyst gagged as she surveyed the contents of the box.

"Betelgeusian."

"Whatever. This bribe stinks. We're telling Pearl." Amethyst said as she tossed the drool-soaked gratuity into a nearby garbage can.

"Fair enough." Garnet said. "Makes you wonder though."

"Wonder what?"

"How we're going to tell her, while still managing to get to the beach in time to see whatever that space cat was afraid would happen." Garnet explained.

"Good point." Amethyst mulled over this dilemma. If Pearl was going to react as badly as the Betelgeusian feared, the whole incident might end by the time either she or Garnet caught up to their neurotic teammate. It'd be a waste to tell her and not bear witness to the consequences. Luckily, centuries of bugging Pearl had imbued in her a very specific brand of cleverness that lay solely in that department and in a few moments, she was confident enough to tell Garnet, "Head over to the beach to make sure the cat and this Dandy guy don't go anywhere. I'll catch up to you in a bit."

"You have a plan?"

"It's more of an outline." Amethyst grinned. "That's usually more than enough."

* * *

><p>60 feet of smooth, taut flesh from top to tip with a clubbed tail taking up about half of that length,<p>

20 meters of leathery wingspan with digits arranged not unlike those of a bat,

Powerful, backwards jointed legs that ended in viciously sharp talons,

And a disproportionally large "face" 6 meters wide and 14 high; little more than a rectangular slab of skin and bone with two beady eyes jutting out of its side.

Shame she couldn't do anything about the color, but it was probably a mostly faithful holographic reproduction of the monster from the previous night.

After Garnet had gotten back to shore, she had asked her for images of their vanquished enemy. The crimson Gem was nothing if not incredibly perceptive, and while partially incomplete, the recordings she provided had been incredibly crisp and detailed in spite of how brief and fast her encounter with it had been. Pearl barely had to fill out any gaps when she cobbled this simulation together.

Pearl walked around the image for what felt like the hundredth time. At first, she had decided to study it so they could better handle encounters with similar creatures in the future. Now she was coming to the disquieting realization that it was incredible they had beaten it the way they did at all. While she couldn't fathom how its wings managed to maneuver it through the depths of space, what wasn't difficult to understand was that this alien was designed for crashing into things at high speeds. Its curved block of a visage was two meters thick with an undoubtedly sturdy spinal structure to support it and she had arranged for Garnet to uppercut what was probably the hardest chin in the solar system.

Well that wasn't entirely accurate as she had elected to simply punch it square in the face, but that didn't change the fact that Garnet could very well have bounced off the beast or worse when they collided. If only she'd known this was what was coming down at them from the stars, she could've planned for it differently. Garnet's powers of perception had given her an approximate weight and size of what to expect, but for all the planning and calculations she had done, she had still been too rash and everyone had almost paid for it.

She sighed, trying to reign in all these dismal scenarios and concentrate on the task at hand. The gambit she had committed everyone to might have been a near-farce, but she could still learn from this stroke of luck. A quick burst of concentration caused the hologram to shift into the shape Garnet had seen the creature take as it streaked through the atmosphere. Wings and legs folded to reduce air resistance, head angled to presumable steer it towards Beach City with the tail set to achieve the same effect. In hindsight, attacking it head-on was practically suicidal, even if its horrid face made for an appetizing target. That must've been the point though, a natural defense system to distract potential attackers from its vulnerabilities. But where would those be located? Hitting it hard from the side might work, but it was clear that the creatures was nothing, if not durable if it could survive using itself for kinetic bombardment before presumably flying back up to do it all over again.

Pearl shook her head at that. The power to visit far-off planets and travel the great void, and this cretin used it purely for destruction. It was a dreadful waste. She looked at the grotesque bullet of tendons and teeth again. Nature might've seen fit to equip it well, but lifeforms forged from chance always had some sort of flaw you could exploit, a weakspot that greater minds could identify. The tail was another appealing target, though the bony club at the end of it hinted that it was as much a distraction as the head on the other end of the creature was. The rest of its body wasn't any more appetizing as it was a powerfully built affair; you might change its course a smidgen, but it was still going to cause some damage. No, she needed to find a place that would completely shatter the beast's momentum when hit, reducing it to little more than a screaming, directionless mess. Of course, its face was completely out of the question. And yet, it was the lynchpin tying the entire attack together. If the assault could be undone in an instant, it would definitely involve this tumorous edifice. In this shape, everything seemed to burst out of the head like bristles from a brush's ferrule. But on closer inspection, she saw that this wasn't entirely the case. There was one feature that broke the illusion of it being a living missile from space. Could it be? Could it really be that simple?

*RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!*

Pearl was so startled by the shrill alarm that she could barely stop herself from sinking hip-deep into the fountain she was standing on, dispelling her object of study. She shivered at the sudden wetness, but quickly set herself back up and began to search her room for the source of the disruption.

The alarm clock was crudely taped to the side of a dingy inner tube that was floating on one of the lower fountains; the one that acted as a kind of passage between her room and Amethyst's…room. Her mischievous teammate must have dug it out of the detritus that littered the caverns of the temple. She groaned before gracefully leaping onto the watery platform, trying to ignore the mechanical shrieking that was now echoing all around her abode.

Pearl made quick work of the device, even taking a moment to expertly tinker with its inner workings so as to make it useless for future skulduggery. Miffed as she was, she couldn't help but wonder how long the clock had been floating here; she had been so wrapped up in studying the recordings that it could've been snuck in at any time during the last hour or so. And then there was the fact that she felt that the other shoe was still to drop, so to speak. Amethyst was a terribly blunt Gem. If her sole aim had been to startle her, then she'd have done it herself just to see the look on her face. There had to be another layer to this or she wouldn't have used something as complex (as far as she could bother to manage) as a timer for one of her pranks.

It was almost a relief when she noticed the bottle floating nearby. Picking it up, she noticed that there was a rolled up piece of paper contained within. How charmingly archaic, Pearl thought as she uncorked the bottle to get at the note. Despite knowing full well that it probably had an insulting message or exceptionally vulgar picture scribbled on it, she decided that it was probably for the best that she got it over with.

"You're dnady ex is at the beach." Pearl read. "Seriously, 'you're'? A little basic grammar wouldn't kill you, Amethyst." And what on earth was a dnady supposed to be? "Probably another spelling error." She thought. "Honestly, if she's only going to bother learning one language, she might as well use it properly. And how many words could there be that had all those letters? Why, the only word I can think of right now is 'dandy', but-." Her mental critique suddenly skidded to a halt. She quickly read the note again.

Dandy?

At the beach?

"Oh no."

* * *

><p>"Well I'm stumped." Greg's brow furrowed in frustration. "I've tried washing it, sanding it, and I even brought out my old buffer."<p>

Jenny Pizza was standing off to the side, trying to look like she didn't care about what Greg had to say, but casting uneasy glances at the side of the Cabriole 1985 he was working on. "So…you can't fix it."

"I'm not saying that." Greg clarified as he put his tools away. "The scratch is way too deep for me to smooth out. Look, you can even see the original paint-job now." He pointed to the streak of silver marring half a slice of pepperoni and a noticeable portion of cheese on the side of the vehicle.

"I used to think it had always been like this." Koffi said.

"Yeah, me too." Greg tried to laugh, perhaps soften the blow of what he'd have to say next. Though with how Jenny was looking up and down the street for what he assumed was her dad, he doubted it would help all that much. "I'm sorry, Jenny. Even if I did know the kind of paint Koffi used on the car, it would still take a while to make it look like nothing happened."

"Oh. That's a shame" Jenny tried to say nonchalantly, but it came out as a kind of half-mumble instead.

"I think you might have to tell your dad about this after all." Greg said.

"No she doesn't!" Steven piped in.

"Hey buddy!" Greg smiled at his son's sudden reappearance. "I was wondering where you ran off to."

"I just had to look around the van for a bit to find THIS!" Steven explained, holding up his spoils for Jenny and his dad to see.

"That's a pretty big sticker." Jenny observed. Then something exceptional about the adhesive label caught her eye. "Wait. Why does it say 'Fish Stew Pizza' on it?"

"Because I got it from you guys." Steven replied. "For every 4 Family-sized pizzas purchased, you receive a free complimentary jumbo sticker! Don't you remember?"

"Oh, I guess I must've been working in the back while that was going on." Jenny said.

Steven's brow furrowed in confusion. "For the entire month of 'Sticker-tember'?"

"Errr, I might've also been using up some sick days at the time." Jenny muttered. "Anyway, how's that supposed to help?"

The boy didn't answer, instead opting to peel the sticker from its contact paper. He then walked over to the car and placed the decal where the door had been damaged. It was a perfect fit. "There you go. Now your scratch mark is just additional advertising for your family's shop!"

Jenny brought a hand to her mouth, only pulling it away once she got the big goofy smile behind it down to a practiced smirk. "Nice one, Steven." She said coolly.

"And the best part is that your dad will never want to remove it!"

Greg nodded. "Taking stickers out is really messy after all. Leaves a lot of residue."

The teen's tightly fixed smile grew a little bigger. "Thanks." She took out her wallet from the back of her shorts. "Here." She handed Steven a crisp five dollar bill. "Use this to buy yourself a photo with the space guy."

"The Space Guy?" Steven asked.

"Yeah. Some loudmouth parked his spaceship down by the beach." Jenny casually said, as if this was a thing that happened every other day. "He's offering people a chance to get their picture taken with it for 5 bucks a selfie."

"How did I not notice that?! Does it actually work?!"

"A bunch of us asked him the same question. He decided to prove it by having it take off in front of everybody." She gave her jacket a little shake, causing a few dozen granules of earthen powder to fall from its crevices. "Kicked up a lot of sand."

"That's so cool!" Steven looked to his father, eyes alight with excitement. "Can I check it out, dad?! Please, please, please?!"

"Well I don't see why not." Greg gave his mullet a scratch as he tried to think of a reason. "Just don't go flying off in it, okay?"

"AWESOME!" Steven whooped as he made a mad dash towards the beach.

* * *

><p>It was just as Jenny had said. There, snugly resting on the sandy slopes of Beach City, its front to the town and its back to the sea, was the coolest spaceship that Steven had ever seen and it only seemed to get more and more awesome the closer he got. The small crowd of people gathered near it did little to impede Steven's view of the domed window that lay atop the ship's middle that probably allowed for stupendous views of the stars as the shuttle traveled through outer space or the large orange outrigger bolted to the side that reminded Steven of an enormous version of those retro laser guns with its ballpoint tip and fancy fins. He could see that it would have dwarfed the one Pearl had made and almost gotten them killed in. But more than its size and the bright yellow paint job that seemed to glow in the late-morning sun, its most prominent feature was undoubtedly its towering crescent nose nestled between twin torpedo-shaped hulls.<p>

It kind of made it look like a giant, metal banana boat.

This just made it seem doubly incredible to Steven, who was hoping the line to take pictures with it wasn't too long. The craft looked amazing from afar, but would probably be even more spectacular up close. Surprisingly, the crowd of onlookers were keeping their distance from the ship itself and were instead impatiently focused on something portly and of a similar shade of yellow that was a few yards away from it. As Steven slipped through his fellow townsfolk to get a closer look, he saw that it was a small robot about his height with two wheels instead of legs and long tube-like arms attached to its pod-shaped body. In place of a face was a small glass screen that displayed two beady black eyes creased in exasperation.

"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to take your picture or move along." It said in an autotuned voice that Steven couldn't help but find adorable. "There are other people waiting in the queue." Aggravated as it looked, the robot was at least trying to be civil. Which was more than could be said for the large, blonde, dreadlocked blogger who Steven was all too familiar with.

"What is your function, space robot?!" Ronaldo demanded.

"Again, it's QT. My name is QT." the robot said. "And I'm the ship's custodian. Satisfied?"

Ronaldo clearly wasn't. "What are your offensive capabilities?!"

There was a soft clanging of metal as QT tapped the side of his head in thought. "My…uh…sharp and sardonic artificial wit?" he offered, hoping this would be enough to get the heavyset weirdo to go bother someone else.

Steven winced a little as Ronaldo chose to continue interrogating the all ready agitated machine. "You could be programmed with the ability to lie…are you lying?!"

"Nah, I'm actually standing." QT's reply managed to get a small chuckle from the assembled onlookers. "See? Wit. Please go."

His polite pleas continued to fall on deaf ears. "Are you a cyborg? Do you actually have some tragically horrific biological components inside of you like guts and eyeballs?!"

"That's disgusting! No!"

"Do you steal them from people so you can feel more…" Ronaldo paused, thinking that it would give what he had to say next a greater sense of weight and severity. "…human?"

"I don't steal organs!" The stainless steel sausages QT had for fingers flexed in frustration; their owner suddenly finding Ronaldo's neck very interesting to look at. "And I don't think living beings have it all that great either." He added.

"Oh, so you have contempt for us organics then?" Ronaldo accused, thinking he had found the copper wire thread needed to unravel this whole synthetic conspiracy. "Is the robot revolution upon us? Are you a scout for the machine menace?"

At this, QT paused, and Steven thought he could see a hint of pain cross over his limited features. "I…I don't…I don't do that kind of stuff. It's not something I'd participate in."

Oblivious to the robot's discomfort, the excitable teen pressed on. "Ah, but do you subscribe to Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics?"

QT's uneasy expression shifted into one of puzzlement. "Asimov's Three Laws?" Steven and the crowd murmured in wonder as the automaton's facial display transformed into a fast-paced video collage featuring hundreds if not thousands of images before two furious eyes returned to the forefront. "Where does a professor of BIOCHEMISTRY get off telling me what I can or can't do?!" QT yelled indignantly.

This was it! Ronaldo thought. He'd finally cornered the bionic infiltrator. "So you admit that there's nothing stopping you from going crazy and killing us all!"

"I'm certainly starting to warm up to the idea." QT answered coldly.

Steven thought that this might be the opportune moment to step in. Overbearing as he might be, Ronaldo was still a pretty good frycoock and him dying could have an adverse effect on Beach Citywalk Fries' bits production. "Hey Ronaldo! What are you doing over there?!" he cheerfully asked as if he had just arrived.

Ronaldo smiled at what he believed to be his reinforcements. "Steven! Check it out! I think this robot over here's the herald for a mechanical invasion from beyond our solar system. One that will stop at nothing to assimilate us into its eldritch fold."

"A mechanical invasion? You don't say."

"Uh huh." Ronaldo nodded. "Luckily we can still cut it off at the pass. Call on the Crystal Gems to smash this robo-creep before he can signal the armada." For someone so in love with the supernatural, Ronaldo was disturbingly focused on eradicating it.

"HEY!" QT chirped.

"Oh sure, Ronaldo. I'll get right on that." Steven gave QT a conspiratorial wink. "But are you sure this is all of them?

"He's the only one here." Ronaldo gasped. "Or maybe he's hiding his shock troop assassins in the ship!"

"Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. I gotta say that I'm just a little bit disappointed in you." Steven gestured for Ronaldo to come close. As the self-styled robot fighter leaned in, Steven whispered, "Don't you think that this all seems a little too obvious? Awesome bright yellow spaceship? Adorable bright yellow robot?"

Ronaldo's face paled in horror. "You think it might be a distraction?!"

"That's exactly what I think, young Fryman. The real invaders might be watching us from the ocean." He pointed to the sea, eliciting a gasp Ronaldo. "Underground." He pointed to the beach; another gasp. "They might even be invisible or hiding among the crowd as replicant androids!" And that elicited the biggest gasp of all. "So before we go in guns, well not guns, more like fists, whips, and spears blazing, we need to know what we're up against. Think you could do that for me, Lochness Blogster?"

There was a yell of victory as Ronaldo broke away from Steven. "You can count on me, Universe!" he assured as he started to rummage through his backpack. "None of these tin soldiers can hide from…METAL MUTT DELUXE!" he cried, pulling out a metal detector that had two more sensor coils than Steven's own Metal Mutt, each with a constipated Rottweiler face painted on it. Ronaldo gave Steven a thumbs up before he started moving about the beach, scanning the ground and any people he passed by, simultaneously dreading and anticipating the triple-bark that signaled the presence of a mobile engine of devastation.

"Make sure to give me any spare quarters you find!" Steven yelled after him. Once Ronaldo was out of earshot, Steven turned to an appreciative-looking QT. "Sorry about that. Ronaldo can get a little gung-ho when it comes to the paranormal."

"Well whatever you want to call it, he was driving me nuts." QT offered one of his hands to Steven. "Thanks for helping me out. I was just seconds away from running him over with my tires."

Steven took the hand in his own and shook, the artificial appendage was warm and the grip gentle. "No problem. Hope the rest of your visit to Beach City is a little less intense."

QT gave a nervous chuckle. "I doubt it, but that's still nice of you to say." He said as he withdrew his arm. "I'm sorry that I can't bump you further up the line, but a lot of these people have been waiting awhile." He indicated towards those assembled behind Steven. "But you could always take some pictures with Dandy. He's over there by the Aloha-Oe counting our profits."

The boy turned to where QT was pointing to see a tall man in a light-grey and white jacket and dark blue jeans leafing through a wad of bills next to the spaceship. "Is he your captain?"

There was a significant delay between Steven asking this and QT responding to it. "I guess if you're feeling generous, you could call him that."

"Neat! See ya, QT." Steven gave a light wave to his new bionic acquaintance.

"Bye Steven. It was nice meeting you." QT returned the gesture, thankful that there was at least one courteous young man on this planet. There was however, this nagging sense of familiarity that he couldn't quite shake. Not with Steven himself, as he was rather sure he had never met the boy before, but his name, common as it was, stirred something in QT's worn databanks; Specifically, the impulse to grab Dandy (optional) and Meow (optional) and leave the system as quickly as possible. Money proved to be a wonderful anesthesia for such worries, and as he accepted another five dollars from a long-faced youth with spiky-white hair, the question of 'Where in the cosmos had he heard that name before?' ceased to be a concern.

Dandy was still flipping through his cash when Steven finally reached him, but the lad noticed that the stack of dollar notes wasn't very big and the man seemed to spend more time casting disapproving glares at his robotic crewmate than counting his money. This left Steven largely ignored, which was fine by him as it gave him a few moments to size up this audacious newcomer without feeling like a total creep for staring. Despite his leaning on the side of the ship, Steven could tell that Dandy was a rather tall fellow of about 30 or more years, lean in body and long in face, but with enough muscle on him that he avoided looking gangly. He was clothed in the jacket and jeans that Steven had spotted from afar, but while his attire wasn't particularly colorful, there were a few flourishes to it that nonetheless added a bit of flair to an otherwise subdued ensemble. Chief among them were his shoes. Most of it looked to be a run-of-the-mill brown leather boot with zippers on the side, but the outsole had either been shoved into or completely replaced by, well, Steven wanted to say big metal clogs that peaked into a steely, grinning mouth at the toe. These, combined with his shiny bracelet, jagged sideburns, golden triangle belt buckle, red shirt, stylized 'D' emblem on the left part of his jacket, and the outrageously trendy regent pompadour on his head reminded Steven of a nouveau-rockabilly. Never mind that he hadn't the foggiest idea what a nouveau-rockabilly was, he was just sure that the term fit this man like mittens and sweaters on kittens.

When it became apparent that Dandy wasn't about to stop scowling at QT anytime soon, Steven made a polite cough to get his attention with an "eh-hexcusme," thrown in for good measure. Naturally, Dandy's first reaction to being snapped out of his one-sided staring contest was to look left, then right, and most surprisingly, up, to locate the source of the disturbance. It took another "eh-hexcuseme," to finally get him to look down.

"Hi." Steven greeted with a smile on his face.

Dandy eyed the boy suspiciously. "Yo." He said, stuffing the cash into his jacket in case the sneaky child in front of him tried any funny business. "Can I help you with something?"

"I was hoping I could get a picture with you and your spaceship." Steven replied, pulling out a five dollar bill that was slightly more crumpled than when Jenny had given it to him.

Now it was Dandy's turn to smile. "Finally. Someone in this town with style and taste. Someone who can appreciate a real space stud of the stars instead of that banana peel-plated hunk of tin over there." Dandy thrust his finger in an oblivious QT's direction.

"QT? What's wrong with people liking him?"

Dandy crossed his arm over his chest and frowned. "What? Just because he's a robot? That's not that impressive. They're a dime-a-dozen if you know where to look. What's he got that I don't?"

Whoops of joy and excitement rang through the beach as QT began juggling Sour Cream and Buck into the air with his deceptively stringy arms.

"Can you do that?" Steven asked.

"Well the dude in the shades looks kind of hefty. Maybe if there was less gravity here and all things being equal…" Dandy trailed off. "…nah."

"There's no need to feel bad. I still think you look pretty cool." Steven assured.

This got him another grin from Dandy. "Do you now?" he asked, though his tone didn't make it seem like much of a question.

Steven nodded. "Yup. Especially your hair. That's a pretty impressive pomp."

"That it is. That it is." Dandy gave the side of his coveted, but seldom praised hairstyle a loving stroke. "And I think your shirt's pretty cool too."

"You do?"

"Sure." Dandy turned around, revealing that there was a bright yellow star, not unlike the one on Steven's rose-colored t-shirt, printed on the back of his jacket. "Like I said, you've got a sense of style."

Steven beamed at the compliment.

"Now." Dandy spun to face Steven again. "To business. Where would you like to immortalize the moment you met me and the Aloha-Oe here?" he asked, tapping the side of his ship.

"Hmm." Steven had to be careful about this. He only had five dollars on hand and if Ronaldo was as good at finding quarters as he was at finding non-Gem related paranormal activity, it was probably all the cash he'd get that day. "What are my options?"

"Well you could always take your picture with the mocha-skinned, ray gun-totting Mona Lisa over there." Dandy pointed to the upturned nose of the ship where a painted image of a scantily clad hula dancer with a silver, conical laser pistol alluringly seated next to teal letters that spelt out 'Aloha-Oe' could be seen. "Then there's the engine at the back." He thrust his thumb an immense black ball at the end of the vehicle that Steven hadn't noticed before due to it being cradled by a circular metal frame lined with four bullet-shaped thrusters. "The red glass rings around it light up hot pink when it's turned on. I could fire it up for a few minutes to give you a good shot of it."

"I'll keep that in mind." Steven said seriously.

"Straddling the Aloha Beam Cannon is a popular choice." Dandy gestured toward the orange outrigger.

"That's a gun?" Steven asked, simultaneously awed and nervous at this revelation.

"A BEAM gun and a pretty big one at that." Dandy proudly stated. "So you can sit on it, maybe get yourself a cowboy hat and pretend you're riding that hair-trigger howitzer all the way to Annihilationville, USA."

Even though Steven didn't own a cowboy hat, the offer did have its appeal. However, the word 'hair-trigger' and how the front of the Aloha Beam was pointed towards Beach City begged a very uncomfortable question. "What are the chances of it going off if I do?"

"Low."

Despite his lack of formal education, even Steven knew that 'low' was, by definition, not the same as 'none'.

The young Universe gulped. "What else you got?"

Dandy scratched the side of his head, bemused. "Man, you are picky. All I've got left to offer is the cockpit."

Steven's response to what Dandy considered to be the most mundane part of his otherwise exceptional ship was as quick as it was unexpectedly enthusiastic.

"It's got a giant pompadour!" Steven exclaimed gleefully.

"Whuh?"

"The pointy fin prow thing!" Steven put his hands to his forehead, fingers pointed forward. "It's like a big metal pomp for the cockpit."

Dumbfounded, Dandy took a step back to gaze at his vessel of many years with new eyes. From a certain point of view, the kid was absolutely right. It did kind of look like the Aloha-Oe was sporting a bladed coif of house-sized proportions. He couldn't have designed it better himself. Not that he intended to let the boy know that. "G-good eye, baby. Not a lot of people pick up on this little design flourish. Isn't that just the way? Make something large and obvious enough, and folks will ignore it. Now come on." He said as he began to walk towards the cockpit. "You've got five whole big ones just itching to buy you an out-of-this-world selfie. And as my wittiest customer of the day, I might even let you take another."

"REALLY?!" Steven squealed with glee. The chance to take a second photo opened up a whole host of new and hilarious possibilities. He could take one of himself and then he could call up Connie and the Gems to join him in the second. Maybe if one of them had a few extra dollars on hand, they could go dutch and have Dandy fly them around in his ship. Pearl would probably like that most of all. "Give me a sec, I wanna make sure we do this right."

"How so?"

"Since our clothes kind of match, it's only natural that we have matching-." Steven took a small plastic comb out of his pocket and swept it through his hair, causing a large portion of it to bunch up at the front like a long black loaf. "-haircuts!"

Dandy blinked. Then he laughed. It was rich, deep, and tinged with mischief; the kind of laugh that could stand on its own regardless if anyone else found the source of its amusement funny. "Well when you're right, you're right." Dandy conceded. "You know something? I just realized that I haven't formally introduced myself." He raised his right hand in a two-finger salute and flashed a dazzling smile. "The name's Dandy, but you can call me Space Dandy."

"Your first name's Space?"

"In the way that matters." Dandy grinned.

This non-answer, purposely designed to elicit intrigue and mystique, was usually met with the rolling of eyes and the diverting of heads whenever it was made. Such was not the case with Steven. "That's crazy! My last name is Universe!"

"No fooling? That's a pretty badass surname."

"Yup." Steven mimicked Dandy's introductory gesture with his left index and middle fingers. "The name's Universe, Ste-."

"WHOAH!" Dandy suddenly grabbed Steven by the shoulder and forced the both of them into a crouching position. "Hold that thought, Mr. Universe." Dandy's bombastic voice had shrunk into a loud whisper. "I just spied two fine looking ladies giving me the eye at 3'o clock. Wait, no. Don't look. I don't want to scare them off."

"Do you think they want their picture taken with the ship, too?" Steven whispered.

"Nah, I think they're trying to see if I'm bad with kids. That's a major dealbreaker for some. Especially single mothers."

"Are you bad with kids?"

The smile Dandy had plastered on his face to keep his voyeurs at ease sagged a little. "Let's just say that I'm working on it. Although…I think you can help me make it look like I'm great with them." Hesitance immediately arrested the Steven's features. No doubt the lad had reservations when it came to deceiving people. "I'll show you around the inside of the Aloha-Oe if you do."

And just like that, those reservations were called off and asked to reschedule on account of management being offered a guided tour of the most awesome spaceship it had ever seen. "What's the plan?"

"Well in my experience, ladies love a guy who can bring joy and whimsy to children." Dandy explained. "Except if he's a clown."

"You've all ready given me plenty of both of those things." Steven assured.

A warm, fuzzy feeling filled Dandy's gut as he heard those words. He wondered if he was suffering from indigestion. "True, but I'm gonna need you to blatantly express that so those two smokin' hot mamas can see I did. So here's what we're gonna do. I'm going to tell you a joke, then you'll laugh at it, and I'll handle the rest."

"Sounds good. Joke away, Dandy!" Steven quietly exclaimed, ready to produce some manufactured glee. However, despite his accomplice's agreement to it, Dandy himself seemed hesitant to enact his scheme. "Any time you're ready."

"Huh. Now that I'm on the spot, nothing comes to mind. Um…" Unbeknownst to Dandy, a lot came to mind. It was just that his last few vestiges of common decency were holding back an odorous tide of some of the vilest gags in the galaxy to spare Steven a repertoire straight from an unwritten jokebook whose phantom pages had long since stuck together.

"I could laugh anyway!" Steven offered eagerly.

"Nice." Dandy clapped his hands together in brief applause. "Let 'er rip, kid."

"Hahahahahahahaha!" Steven laughed, trying to make it as loud and genuine as he could.

"That should do it." Dandy managed to say through a smile that was becoming more sincere by the second. "Now it's my turn. Keep your eyes on me, Mr. Universe. You might just learn something." He playfully ruffled Steven's hair to complete the illusion before standing up to face his oglers.

As Steven worked to repair his improvised pompadour, he wondered which of Beach City's outstanding bachelorettes had found themselves enamored with Dandy. Nanafuna was a widow, wasn't she? Perhaps Jenny had come back after returning the family car to the shop. He hoped it wasn't Sadie or Connie's mom. That might make things awkward. With his hair finally fixed, he turned to get a glimpse of his new friend's admirers. His surprise at who they were was swiftly transformed into curiosity as he wondered how things would play out once Dandy reached them.

Though the Slammerhead had made itself scarce, Dandy was having a pretty good day. QT was making them a tidy sum with his robotic antics, he had met a child that wasn't completely irritating, and he had even managed to get Meow out of the way for a little peace of mind. And now, there were two 8-9/10s that were looking right at him and didn't show signs of stopping as he approached. At this rate, he might make it out of this town completely undiscovered.

They were a rather colorful duo. The one on the right was a tall, red-skinned woman garbed in a very flattering black and crimson leotard that puffed at the shoulders and accentuated her robust hips and thick legs. Her eyes were covered by a pair of peach-pink full shield sunglasses with jagged edges where the lenses dipped and her stoic face was framed by a thick, formidable square afro. Her companion couldn't have been any more different, but she had her own distinct charms. She was a little on the short side, barely a head taller than QT, possessing light purple skin and a long, shaggy mane of white hair that made his eyes take in the entirety of her curvaceous stocky build. Her clothing was less exotic than her friend's; black leggings with star-shaped cut outs at the knee, a pair of white boots, but the off-shoulder tunic with the exposed sports bra-clad shoulder was always a winning combination no matter how you sliced it.

"You know it's kind of rude to stare." He playfully chastised as he reached them. "As a visitor to your fair city, it's my sacred right to be the one taking a gander at everything, not the other way around." He brought a hand to his chest as if to comfort his wounded heart after this grievous breach of tourism taboo. "But I'd be more than willing to forgive you two Technicolor damsels if you'd show me around town. And in exchange, I'd be more than happy to give you a very, very personal tour of your local solar system in my personal spaceship." He snapped his fingers and pointed them at the dusky damsel in the shades. "How does that sound?"

She winced in response, then turned away to rub at the area beneath her glasses, mouth settling into a frown.

"Uh…you all right?" Dandy asked, wondering if he had put too much charisma in the gesture.

"You're…" the tall one began. "…hard to look at." She finished, refusing to face Dandy as she did so.

"Ouch." It hadn't been the first time Dandy had heard that said to him and to his chagrin, he knew it probably wouldn't be the last. "That hurts, baby." He might've wondered why she had been staring at him during his conversation with the kid if it hadn't been for a squeal of barely restrained excitement coming from his left. "Well at least someone's happy to see me." He said, lowering his head to lock gazes with the alarmingly enthusiastic eyes of the smiling, violet half of the lasses. "How about you, gorgeous? Taking me up on my offer just means you don't have to share me with anyone else late-."

His offer was brought to an abrupt halt by a very loud, very annoying, and very familiar voice. "DANDY!"

He hung his head as his body shuddered in frustration, trying to keep his anger at being interrupted from showing. "Meow." Dandy said through gritted teeth, unwilling to look at his feline crewmate lest he give in to the temptation to trounce him. "Can't you see that I'm a little busy here?"

"You should be busy running! Look at the short one's chest!" Meow ordered from a considerable distance.

"Shame on you, Meow. I'm far too much of a gentleman to do something like that." Though Dandy had to admit, he had spent a little too much time studying their hips to the detriment of admiring their upper torso regions. Nothing he couldn't fix with the raising of his head and the opening of one eye. "But if you insist." He conceded, not even bothering to keep his voice down. "I don't think one little peek could hurrrrrrAUGH!" the sight of the gem partially concealed by Amethyst's top caused Dandy to fall backwards in shock. The sand made for an excellent cushion though, so much so that he felt completely comfortable scurrying backwards on it; his frightened gaze never shaking from the two Crystal Gems, even as he got himself upright a few yards away from them. He finally managed to tear his eyes away to cast a furious glance at where Meow's voice had come from.

The Betelgeusian couldn't have been more than two meters from where Dandy had chosen to stand; pizza box in his paws and a shaky smile on his face. "I got the pizza."

Now Dandy knew that getting angry at Meow wasn't going to help matters, but it felt rather appropriate and it would distract him from thinking about how utterly screwed they all were. "What the heck, Meow?! Why didn't you tell me that these two were out of their temple?"

"Yeah!" he heard Amethyst yell. "And how did you get here after we did? We've been standing here for like half an hour!"

"I might've…stopped for donuts on the way here." Meow confessed.

"Meow…" Dandy seethed, recognizing that the space cat's tone implied that there was more to his incompetence than that.

"And there might've been a slight detour at this french fry place. Then there was that retro arcade I ducked into…" The pizza box was shaking now. "But that was all to get them off our trail."

"You told us where he was." Amethyst reminded.

"Seriously? And why didn't you just call me on your communicator so we could get the hell out of dodge?!" Dandy tapped the gold band on his left wrist for emphasis.

"Th-that's beside the point!" Meow said, his crocs inching little by little in the Aloha-Oe's direction.

"That is the absolute largest point right now, you walking mountain of dandruff!" Dandy yelled. "Because you couldn't keep your big mouth shut, I've fallen into this massive honey trap. She's probably on her way right now with spears and swords and god knows what else!"

"Why would she do that?" Amethyst asked, the mention of pointy weaponry making it quite clear who Dandy was talking about, if not her motivations for assaulting him with said implements.

His rage having muted his fear, Dandy moved to face what he thought to be one of the agents of his destruction. "You know exactly wh-wait." It was confusion's turn to take the wheel. "What did you say?"

"I said why would she do that?"

"You guys don't know?" Dandy asked, feeling very much like a lamb who didn't know whether to be relieved or wary when if found out that the wolf chasing it was actually something in a wolf costume. On one hand, it probably wasn't a wolf, but something deranged enough to dress and act like one might be just as deadly. "She never told you about me?"

Amethyst shook her head. Garnet was too busy rubbing her temples to reply, but Dandy was going to consider that a negative.

"Huh. I'm a little insulted that she didn't." Dandy muttered. "But it's not something you two should worry about." He let out a strained laugh that failed to elicit so much as a chortle from anyone else. "But out of curiosity, she didn't see me and my ship come in did she?"

"Nah."

Dandy let out a sight of relief. "Great."

"But I did tell her someone dandy was at the beach."

"WHAT?!" He cringed, but noticed that there was still a small glimmer of hope in this scenario, a hole in her statement that he might still be able to crawl through to safety. "That can't be right! She'd be here by now if you did!"

Amethyst crossed her arms over her chest as her face became the very picture of smug triumph. "It was a bit of a delayed message."

At that, something big, fast, and pink shot right past Dandy and slammed into Meow, causing it and him to tumble across the sand in a whirl of earth and fur. To the Betelgeusian's relief, when the tumult finally came to a halt, he found that he had managed to keep a hold on his pizza. To the immediate cessation of that relief, he soon realized that he was being pinned to the ground by what could only be described as a big, pink lion.

It snarled.

Meow screamed.

"AUGH!" Ronaldo yelled from somewhere. "The robot horde is attacking us with lions!"

"MEOW!" an alarmed autotuned voice yelled as QT speeded towards his fallen companion. "Don't worry. J-just stay still and I'll think of some way to-" The lion roared in the charging robot's direction, sending out a bright pink shockwave of sound and light that blew the automaton away. "Ahhhhh!"

"Sonuva-!" Dandy whipped something out from behind him. It resembled a white, red, and blue version of the ray gun the mascot of his ship wielded. He pointed the laser pistol at the beast, his finger on its trigger. "Get your paws off of the cat, cat! And keep those sonic jaws of yours shut! Because I'm pretty sure I charged this thing today!" he threatened, trying to sound confident.

Meow held no such reservations about how tree-climbingly terrified he actually was. "SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT!"

"I don't think that's such a good idea." QT groggily warned, having gotten himself back on his wheels. "Given his usual level of accuracy, Dandy would probably end up killing you too."

"I DON'T CARE!" Meow wretched as a sliver of drool from the lion's open jaws fell into his shrieking mouth. "I'D RATHER GET VAPORIZED THAN EATEN!"

"Last chance, fuzzball!" Dandy cried, but the lion refused to budge and the gradual opening of its maw over Meow's hysterical face made its intentions unmistakable. "Fine," his finger tightened. "Have it your way, you cotton candied creep."

Dire as the situation was, Dandy took a moment to appreciate that this was one of the clearest shots he'd ever been presented with in his many years of spotty marksmanship. At this range and with a target that big, there was probably a 60% chance that Meow would come out of this completely unscathed. So it was only natural that as he was about to fire, the kid came between him and the lion.

"Stop!" Steven pleaded, raising his arms to his sides as if to act as even more of a human shield to the enormous carnivore behind him. "Don't shoot!"

"What the-? Universe?! Get out of the way! I'm about to teach this yarn-chasing nimrod a lesson about bullying smaller and dumber members of his kind!"

Meow howled in despair. "IF THERE'S ANYONE LISTENING UP THERE, PLEASE DON'T LET ME DIE WHILE EVERYONE STILL THINKS I'M A CAT!"

"Try to calm down, Mr. Space Cat!" Steven recommended. "He really hates it when his meals scream at him!"

The Betelgeusian's reaction to being called a meal was as predictable as it was cacophonic.

"How do you even know that?" Dandy asked as he wondered if he could shoot over Steven's head somehow.

"That's because he's kind of my lion?" Steven reluctantly admitted. "So believe me when I say that I'm sure this is all a huge misunderstanding. And if you could put down your pointy space gun, that might make things better."

"Kind of? Might?! Kid, I don't know what you're trying to pull, but you can either get your 'pet' off of Meow or get out of the way. Because nothing, except maybe my arms getting tired, is going to make me lower this blaster!"

Suddenly, Dandy felt something fly past the back of his head, followed by the hair there being tugged sideways and his ears popping from the sharp crack of the sound barrier being broken. Then there was another sonic boom, this one to the left of him, and carried with it a lesser clamor that he immediately recognized: the din of something colliding with the Aloha-Oe.

"Awwwwwwww yes!" Amethyst exclaimed. "IT'S HAPPENING!"

When Dandy looked to his ship to see what had occurred, he wasn't sure what 'it' was supposed to be apart from that it was 'happening'. Was 'it' the Aloha-Oe being lifted off of the ground by the force of the phantom blow? Perhaps 'it' was how the attack caused the ship to tilt so much that it ended up balancing on the pointed posterior that was its engine. Or maybe 'it' was how, to the horror of its crew, the Aloha-Oe fell backwards onto the sand, leaving the craft upside-down and its immense horned bow buried in the surf.

The object that fell spinning from the sky and imbedded itself into the ground in front of him was a major clue. The ivory shaft caught his attention first, but the ornate turquoise end of it that fed into the ground was what ultimately made him realize what 'it' was.

He looked back where the spear had been thrown to see 'it' leap over her companions. His blaster hung lamely at his side as 'it' skidded to a halt in front of him and spun. There was little he could do when 'It' lashed out with a deceptively lithe leg whose foot stopped just inches from his throat in the middle of the roundhouse kick. 'It' was also very, very unhappy to see him.

Dandy gulped, his Adam's Apple lightly grazing the sole of a ballet slipper.

"Hey Pearl."

* * *

><p>"<em>Let go of it, dummy!" Amethyst yelled.<em>

"_Pearl! Get out of there! Let go!" Garnet demanded._

"_No! I've found its weak spot! I can do this! I can take it down!" Was what she had said._

_She should have listened to them._

_If she had, then she wouldn't have been dragged into the sky amidst a living storm of scrap metal and compost. There was little she remembered from that point onward apart from how its roars died as they escaped the atmosphere and how her attempts to drive her spear deeper into its back turned into a desperate effort to hold onto the weapon for dear life. There was a tremendous pink flash, followed by one last devastating buffet of force that completely drained her of strength. Her body broke under the assault and her last thoughts before slipping into the darkness were of the Temple and the hope that her gem would survive the fall back to Earth. The others would give her such a talking to if she made it home._

_She almost dreaded coming out of stasis, even though it was a clear indication that she hadn't been ground into gem dust from the impact of her landing. Because now it was time to plan for the long trek home. Or the long voyage home. Or maybe she could stow away on a transport flight of some kind. Regardless, the chore ahead needed to be done, however unpleasant its finish. She was alive. She could move. And most importantly, she could think. There was no excuse for her not to make her way back to Beach City. Upon opening her eyes to take in her surroundings, she realized that, once again, she was wrong. For there was a very sizable excuse as to why she couldn't just walk or sail back to the Temple. _

_Looking up had been her first instinct as she could perhaps use the position of the sun or stars to help determine where she was. There was an abundance of both beyond the domed window above her, but all of them told her the same thing. She couldn't possibly be on Earth anymore. And though she knew that the prospect should have distressed and horrified her, she couldn't bring herself to really care. All that she could feel at the moment was awe._

_How long had it been since she had seen the titanic and sublime body of a nebula with her naked eye? When was the last time the colors of the stars were anything other than a dull white or blue? Human poets and philosophers bemoaned the blackness of night and the empty void above, but being trapped on Earth robbed them of the ability to see how gorgeous and full they were. Space had layers and tones, shape and scale. The reds, blues, greens, and purples of the infinite horizon, cast from the reflections of countless celestial embers bouncing off one another and massive clouds of elemental matter. A cluster of blazing heavenly bodies, some gold, some orange, some blue, all beautiful, lay before her and she could, for the first time in years, easily tell which ones were closer and which ones were farther from her. _

_If she felt so inclined, she could study their placement and hash out a vague idea of where in the galaxy the Shatterlite had taken her. But that part of Pearl was silent. Logic and propriety sat alongside wonder and melancholy as they took in this familiar sight and drank in the almost forgotten feeling of being liberated by the largeness of the universe instead of trapped by it. Peaceful. That was it. Far from a land of decay and conflict, distant from those she bickered with and loved, she felt peaceful. Had it really been so long since she experienced such absolute tranquility? Would she need to strand herself on a destitute world for centuries, for millennia until she escaped so she could feel like this again? _

_Then she noticed the palm tree._

_Then came the string._

_Had she been paying attention, she might've avoided it, but she was far too bewildered by how a tree from the world she had been wrested from had apparently chased her here. It snapped around her in an instant. Thin, but surprisingly strong, as it resisted her instinctive attempts to break out of it. Her legs bound together and her arms tied to her chest, there was nothing she could do as her struggles sent her tumbling to the ground._

_In a single dizzying instant, the gentle, ethereal stars in her vision were replaced with a hard, metal floor._

"_Oh yeah! Two for two, QT!" _

**To be continued…**

Author Note: Sorry that this chapter was so long. With everything set up, future installments should only be a third or a half of this one in length. Hopefully.

Read and Review and all that!

Hope you enjoyed it!


	2. You Can't Keep a Good Dandy Down, Baby

**Chapter 2: You Can't Keep a "Good" Dandy Down, Baby**

"_Next." Pine-Pine announced over Dandy's pompadour. Not exactly a difficult feat as even while sitting, her great height made her tower over the alien hunter. There was a sense of definitiveness in her tone. It all but said that she would broker no further argument and that her word on the matter was final. But Dandy had more than enough words for the both of them._

"_C'mon baby. Run it through one more time. I'm sure it's just a glitch in the system." Dandy pleaded._

_One of the ears atop Pine-Pine's head twitched, sending a small ripple of movement across her emerald tresses. Though largely silent, this motion would've spoken volumes to those closest to her. It meant that she was either keenly interested, in which case her friends would get out of her way so they wouldn't get between her and the object of her amorous fascination, or immensely annoyed, in which case her friends would also get out of her way, but with significantly more haste. So while anger hadn't taken over her senses just yet, she did wonder if the threat of being bored to death was suitable justification for violent self-defense. "We've been over this three times, Dandy. And I've all ready told you that there's nothing there."_

"_Are you serious?! Look, I know she's pretty scrawny, but there's definitely an alien in that canister. She's gotta be worth something!" Dandy claimed as he gestured toward the scanner._

"_LET ME OUT OF HERE!" something demanded from the wildly bucking containment tube, the alleged alien having finally managed to get her gag off after half-an-hour of muffled hysterics. Pine-Pine thought that it had way too snooty and demanding a voice for someone who had been captured by one of the most inept alien hunters she had ever met._

_Regaining her ability to yell seemed to embolden the captive creature, as her slamming against her transparent confines only intensified. This caused the canister to violently jerk from side to side, making it knock against the walls of the robust, but paradoxically fragile, metal archway it was placed in. "If it damages any ARC equipment, you're going to have to pay for the necessary repairs."_

_Normally that statement would cause Dandy to panic and fall in line. The Alien Registration Center was where he received cash, not where he gave it away. Such an occurrence would be an affront to nature on par with fountains draining water out of the thirsty that used them or athletes competing to see who could lose the most medals. Or at least, that's how Dandy saw it. On this occasion, the statement caused him to smile as if Pine-Pine had given him a helpful piece of advice instead of a veiled threat. "That's it! She's been moving around so much that you probably haven't been able to get a good fix on her, right?" Not waiting for her response, he dashed to his captive and used his arms to try and hold the tube in place._

_This seemed to work as both the container and the alien stopped moving._

"_YOU!" the alien spat. Then it continued to slam itself against the glass, this time in Dandy's direction. _

"_How about now?!" Dandy asked as he braced himself against the clumsy impacts._

_Pine-Pine decided it would be best to show Dandy the results. Just telling them to him clearly wasn't working. She snapped an image of them with her tablet and then reached over the counter to give him a good view of the screen. "See?" she tapped on the image of the x-ray._

"_I see bones!" Dandy said, narrowly pulling back just in time to avoid another hit._

"_Those are yours."_

"_Damn it!" he cursed._

"_Where did you even find this thing, Dandy?" Pine-Pine asked, figuring that he owed her that much for all the time he had wasted._

"_Found a rock floating in space. When I brought it on board, this popped out."_

"_I AM NOT A THIS!" his would-be bounty yelled._

_Technically she was, Pine-Pine mused. "You said it came out of a rock, and that's all I'm getting on my scanner: a rock."_

"_Then how is she kicking against the glass and swearing at me right now?!" Dandy asked, simultaneously acknowledging and ignoring the fact that the rock was now free of its leg bindings._

"_My guess is that its body is just some kind of elaborate hard light construct coming from the rock." Pine-Pine inferred. "Kind of like a hologram."_

"_Really?" Dandy certainly hadn't been expecting that. "Think there's a switch on it to make her less shrill?"_

_There was the sound of breaking glass followed by Dandy's high-pitched squeal of surprise and the man himself being pulled inside the broken containment unit. Somewhere between Dandy's questioning and Pine-Pine's theorizing, the rock had managed to get its arms free. Now it was making good use of them as it tried to pummel Dandy within the cramped confines of the tube. However, everyone watching the cylinder jerk back and forth in the struggle silently and unknowingly agreed that the alien really should have exited the tube to get at Dandy instead of pulling him inside._

"_OW! I thought you were made out of light! Why do your punches hurt so much?!"_

"_The answer is beyond your meager ability to understand, you scruffy, irreverent rube!"_

"_Rube?! I'll show you a rube-YOWCH! That was like kicking the inevitable object."_

"_It's the 'IMMOVABLE' object you-OW!"_

"_Haha! LOOKS like your eyes are as vulnerable as anyone else's!"_

"_I'll destroy you for that atrocious pun you-hey-LET GO OF MY ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-LET GO OF MY HAIR!" _

_A murmur of discontent was spreading among the hunters in Pine-Pine's queu. She sighed; this was starting to get humiliating for everyone. Worse, it was holding up the line and there were a lot of promising entrants in front of her patiently waiting their turn. No more than eight feet away was a Corvonian scavenger with what might've been a new subspecies of Yingot. Or perhaps it was just a Yangot infected with the clap. Either way, it looked to be a more interesting, not to mention more profitable, use of her time than watching Dandy tussle with his latest and lamest lemon._

"_Well I'll give you two lovebirds some privacy." Over the screams and awkward blows, neither 'lovebird' could hear her slam the big blue button on her right. They only really sensed something was amiss when the bottom of the scanner opened up from under them, and not even that was enough to prevent Dandy from getting a few cheap blows in. "Have a nice day." Pine-Pine smiled as the pair fell through the trapdoor, blasted through a series of uncomfortable metallic tunnels, before ultimately being spat out of the Alien Registration Center and into the frigid arms of outer space._

"_Next."_

* * *

><p>While you wouldn't be at fault for assuming such, Dandy wasn't a complete idiot. He did and said idiotic things on a distressingly frequent basis, but not all the time. And while alarmists from all corners of civilized space cried foul at dropping IQs and attention spans, there was an unspoken agreement among the intergalactic intelligentsia that morons, as in total morons, didn't actually exist and would probably never exist again if they had. Ignorance could be bliss, but stupid doesn't live very long.<p>

Unbeknownst to Dandy, people assuming that he was a complete idiot had worked in his favor for many years. For if they took him as seriously as he wanted them to, it was doubtful that he'd ever nab any aliens at all. All they saw was an obnoxious, egotistical imbecile - which he was - and discounted him as a threat. The assumption, however valid, did nothing to prepare them for the shock and humiliation they experienced when he used mental faculties they believed he didn't possess to outmaneuver, or worse, outsmart them. Having brought a foot to his throat after flipping the Aloha-Oe over with her spear - thereby robbing him of his only means of escape - it was clear that Pearl wasn't taking any chances with Dandy.

Conversely, chances were all that he had at the moment. They had been locked in this position for a full minute after he had cautiously greeted her and despite being the one standing on one leg, she showed no signs of tiring. He feared that if he made any sudden movements, she'd decapitate him with a second roundhouse kick, bring out another spear to run him through, or simply crush his windpipe with the bottom of her foot as one would stomp on a slow, juicy bug. That last one worried Dandy the most; there were all kinds of horrible and humiliating ways you could die in the universe, but being stepped on was still really low on the list.

It was clear that Pearl had the advantage here, as he knew she would if this encounter ever happened. The silence threw him off though. He thought there'd be a lot of yelling or him getting punched over the horizon. Neither had happened, at least not yet, and Dandy would've been fine with that if it wasn't for the look on Pearl's face. Those who believed cold fury was a contradiction or an emotion exclusive to aggravated polar bears need only look at how her stern, frosty countenance could barely conceal a monumental rage that would explode if exposed to the naked air. Silence, he knew, wasn't going to diffuse or diminish that anger, so Dandy needed a way to break the tundra-sized ice between them without making Pearl break his neck in turn. To put it and all of the above simply, a lot of thought went into what he said next.

"So…new tights?" Dandy asked, managing to tear his eyes away from her cold, blue eyes to stare down her leg.

The response, like her gaze, was terribly frigid and quietly hateful. "Is that all you have to say to me?"

"New…socks?" Dandy offered, taking note of how her once lime-green leggings had been replaced by pink ones.

In his defense, it was really hard to concentrate when Meow wouldn't stop screaming.

"WHY HASN'T ANYONE GOTTEN THIS THING OFF OF ME YET?!"

Based on the flash of annoyance that briefly flickered over Pearl's steely expression, it appeared that she was beginning to find this distracting as well.

"So what's with the cat?" she asked in a manner that implied that she didn't really care about the answer, but still expected a valid response.

"I'm not a ca-." there came a curt, loud growl from above him. "-ha-HA-HAAAA-unless you want me to be! Solidarity, am I right? RIGHT?!"

Thankful to have her attention, if not her foot, focused elsewhere, Dandy saw no harm in telling her all there was to know about his soon-to-be lion chow companion. "Meow's a Betelgeusian and he's been travelling with me and QT for a few months. Thought he was a rare alien at first until I got a closer look at him." Wanting to stretch this depressingly short story a bit further, he added. "He's our…uh…I'm not really sure what he does. He's useful sometimes, so we let him stick around. I just wish we could do something about the smell, y'know?"

"Mistaking him for a rare alien?" Pearl laughed cruelly. "How unfortunate. But I'm sure you'll find some way to get rid of him eventually, Dandy."

Dandy stiffened, realizing too late that he could've worded that anecdote a bit better. Ah well, he thought. He might as well try to roll with the punches. "Maybe. I mean, that lion you sicced on him sure helps."

"He was supposed to go after you."

"Ah." Dandy couldn't even bring himself to feign surprise at that.

"Yes, ah." Pearl said, the reiteration dripping with condescension. "Now what are you doing here?"

Given the chance to do things over, Dandy would've gladly traded places with Meow. Surviving a lion attack made for some stellar bragging rights and if you were killed by one, at least you'd get a pretty cool obituary out of the deal; and unlike his chatterbox of a mouser that it was looming over, that particular pink queen of the jungle seemed incapable of speech. Meaning Pearl's passive-aggressive barbs, of which he suspected there was much more to come, were probably beyond its ability to make.

"Hunting aliens." Dandy stated with forced cheer. "What else?"

"Well." She ruefully chuckled. "You can go hunt aliens somewhere else. Like another planet, or a sun, or a black hole. So take QT-."

"Hi Pearl." QT chimed in.

"Hello, QT." Pearl greeted back. "So take QT, your cat, and your ship, and leave. Now."

Dandy was all too prepared to take this offer to leave with his limbs and most of his dignity intact. Then he looked back at the Aloha-Oe. Then back at Pearl. Then back to the Aloha-Oe. And then back to Pearl again. "I can't." he said. "You totaled my ship."

Pearl's eyes, which had been narrowed into a subdued scowl, widened. Finally breaking eye contact with Dandy to spare a glance at his vessel, she appeared shocked. Almost as if she was just noticing how much damage her ambush had caused. "It's not nearly as bad as all that."

"You flipped it upside down."

"I only did that so you'd take me seriously." she said, failing miserably to reign in her flustered features into what they were when she had simply been angry.

"So you were trying to intimidate me into leaving?" Pearl nodded at Dandy's very informed guess. "By making it impossible for me to leave?"

"It's turned over, not scuttled!" she said, exasperated. "At worst, it's a mild inconvenience. All you need to do is flip it back to the way it was."

"Does that mean you're going to put the foot down and help me do that?"

"No, I am not going to help you!" she snapped. "That would defeat the entire purpose of what I just did!"

"All right, all right. Don't bite my head off." Dandy brought his hands up in a pacifying motion, an effect that was partially ruined by him still holding his ray gun with one of them. Realizing his faux-pas, due in no small part to Pearl's alarmed and then irate reaction to it, Dandy quickly holstered his weapon with a timid smile before shouting behind him. "Hey QT! Use those teen-juggling arms of yours to get the Aloha-Oe right-side up again, would ya?"

QT was less than thrilled at the prospect. "That's nuts! There's no way I can lift it by myself!"

Dandy pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand, silently reminding himself to never think he was having a good day until it was truly done. Honestly, did he have to do everything around here? "Universe?"

Prior to this, Steven's attentions had been torn between Dandy and Pearl's tense, but increasingly farcical exchange and Meow's endless screaming. So it took him a few seconds to register that Dandy was calling out to him over the Betelgeusian's begging. "Yes?"

"Would you mind getting your lion off of Meow so he can help QT?" Dandy asked.

"Sure. But I have to warn you, even though he's kind of mine, he doesn't really listen to me that often." Steven confessed. "Actually, he only really comes around the Temple whenever he's tired or hungry."

"Well he's definitely your cat then." Dandy confirmed, rolling his wrist in Steven's direction. "And you don't need to make him listen to you. Just give him something he likes and he'll buzz off to play with that instead." He paused, suddenly thoughtful. "What do lions enjoy anyway? Besides she-lions, I mean?"

Pearl groaned. "The proper term for them is lionesses."

Dandy either ignored her or was too caught up in this inane quandary to hear. "Yarn? Laser Pointers? Do they make any King of the Jungle-sized cat wands?"

"He likes food." Steven offered.

Meow screamed.

"No, no, not like that." Steven said, trying to calm Meow down. Lion's mouth had closed and his roaring had quieted down to a low growl that would suddenly get louder without warning. No one knew that the big cat carefully planned these moments as it found the smaller creature's panicked reactions to the bursts of volume rather amusing. "Well it's kind of like that. But not just in a predator-prey hunting way. He also likes cooked food too. Maybe you could give him that pizza."

Meow looked down at the box he had been tightly holding to his chest like a greasy, cardboard security blanket. "But I'm only halfway done with this one." He meekly protested, his voice surprisingly clear after several minutes of nonstop blubbering.

At his utterance of 'this one', another growl tinged the air; this one coming from Dandy. "Forget it. Just tell your lion to eat them both, Universe."

Pearl's admonishment of "Don't tell him what to do," was drowned out by Meow unleashing one final desperate scream as he shoved the pizza box at Lion's face. To his horror, he had underestimated his reach and had bonked the pink snout above him with the flat of the container. This elicited a surprised roar from the beast.

As the alien let out an emphatic whimper in turn, Lion took a sniff of the box's contents while wrinkling the feeling back into his nose. Finding the scent passable, it gently bit down on its source and lifted it out of Meow's trembling, but feeble grip. Lion sauntered off as cats of any size are wont to do, kicking some sand onto his former source of amusement as he walked towards Steven.

"Y-yeah." Meow coughed, getting himself back onto his hind legs. "Y-you better walk away," he said quietly.

"Hmph." Pearl was less than impressed. "Now that you've stopped cowering, you might as well go help QT."

Meow frowned, the removal of fanged and painful death from his proximity having restored some of his nerve. "Who died and put you in charge?"

It bears repeating that Pearl was still threatening his current 'boss' with a leg that could shatter granite "Really not the best question to be asking right now." Dandy said.

Amethyst, doing her best to keep a straight faced, nodded. "You really should do what she says. No telling when Lion'll get hungry again."

The Betelgeusian tensed and chanced a brief look at his former tormenter. Lion caught his eye and with his mouth still around the offered junk food, flashed Meow a huge, toothy smile. "Fine." Meow stomped off to meet up with his robotic crewmate at their half-buried vehicle, coveting the protection several inches of hybrid alloys and a few lightyears would hopefully provide against big, pie-stealing bullies.

Satisfied that the grumbling cat was on his way to somehow get the Aloha-Oe up and running, Pearl's attentions shifted to her young charge. "Steven, take Lion and go back to the Temple. The rest of us will catch up to you later."

"Steven?" Dandy echoed quietly. "Wait, so he's-?"

His question was swiftly halted by the sole of Pearl's foot pressing against his throat. He was reminded of a dagger touching, but not breaking skin. "-nothing you should be concerned about." Pearl finished for him.

"Hey," Steven tried to say. "You don't have to hurt him."

"Well I most certainly want to!" Pearl barked.

Steven winced. "But why?" he asked, genuinely confused at how a day filled with stickers, spaceships, and selfies could take such an angry and hateful turn.

Pearl's face softened as she saw how despondent Steven's looked. "I'll explain everything later, Steven." Seeing that he was still staring at where her foot was pressing against Dandy's neck, she bent her knee a tad so that her slipper was no longer touching his flesh. Both Steven and Dandy let out sighs of relief. "Right now, I'd feel a lot more relaxed if you were back home, safe, and far from here." She said, punctuating that last detail with a pointed glower at Dandy.

"Go ahead, Steven. We'll be fine." Dandy encouraged, immediately understanding that 'more relaxed' also meant 'less murderous'.

Reluctantly, Steven climbed onto Lion's back, careful not to jostle the pizza box out of his fuzzy friend's jaws. He decided to take one last look at the scene surrounding him. The Aloha-Oe overturned with its prow, which had once pointed upward to the stars it traversed, now buried in the sand and pelted with waves. Meow was doing some light stretches in between looking at his phone with interest and looking at the ocean with distrust. If his confrontation with Lion had been indicative of his strength, then the ship wasn't going to be moving anytime soon. QT was also doing stretches, more out of a desire to delay this embarrassing and impossible task as long as he could than to avoid having his nonexistent muscles cramp. Pearl and Dandy were taking a break from their mutually uncomfortable and uneven deadlock to watch him leave. Amethyst was clearly on the cusp of dumping all pretense of seriousness and just laughing as hard as she felt like at the situation. In contrast to her fixation on the conflict, Garnet was looking away from it, unable or unwilling to watch it unfold. The rest of the beach was empty, everyone having fled after the spears and insults started flying. "Bye guys." Steven said to the Gems. "Bye Dandy."

"Catch you later, Steven." Dandy replied, flashing the best smile he could under the circumstances. In spite of how dour things looked and were, Steven found himself smiling back. Then he gave Lion a soft pat on the side of his mane and soon the two of them were racing towards the temple. Dandy whistled. Lion riding was pretty hardcore after all.

"Catch you later?" Pearl repeated incredulously.

"Aw come on, baby. You know I meant nothing by it. Considering…" he tapped his forehead for emphasis.

"Right…right. That's right." Pearl said. She took a moment to clear her throat of nothing at all. "Now, the second that your crew-."

"**HNNNNNNNNNNNG!"** came a catlike and synthesized heave from the Aloha-Oe.

Pearl tried again. "The second that your cre-."

"**HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNG!"**

"The second that-!"

"**HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNG!"**

That did it. Amethyst could take it no longer. This was just too much. No more holding back. "AHAHAHAHAHAHA!" she laughed, pointing at Meow and QT's futile attempt to move the ship. "It's funny because there's no way they can possibly do that!" she explained, bursting into another fit of laughter.

"AMETHYST!" Pearl yelled.

"Whuh?"

Pearl jerked her head in the direction of the struggling alien hunters. "Help those two get that ship back on its landing gear!"

"But it's your fault that it's like that in the first place!" Amethyst protested.

"Just do it!" Pearl ordered.

Normally, Amethyst wouldn't let Pearl get away with blatantly ordering her around without a snarky comment or a retaliatory act of severe insubordination. But for many reasons, she found herself compelled to obey, however grudgingly. The prank had run its course. There had been some mayhem, some drama, lots of laughter-mostly from her-at those two things, but the bedlam didn't seem like it would escalate further so she saw no point at letting it drag on. That was a surefire way to kill any joke. Plus, and this was a big plus, Pearl had this furious look in her eyes that basically said that if the object of her ire wasn't off of the planet in the next ten minutes, she'd probably kick Amethyst into the next county to blow off some steam.

"Should have known you'd find a way to ruin this, too." Amethyst grumbled as she passed Pearl.

"Garnet." Pearl called out in a gentler tone. "If you don't feel like you're up for it, you don't have to-."

"I can lift it." Garnet said. "I just have a bit of a headache. That's all." She followed Amethyst, giving Dandy a wide berth as she went by him.

At this juncture, any sane person in Dandy's situation would keep their mouths shut and try to bide their time until the vehicle of their escape was up and running. No need to engage and possibly provoke the sentient rock lady who might decide to change her mind and snap their neck after all. All they'd need to do was remain perfectly silent and inoffensive. Regrettably, that just wasn't the Dandy Way.

"Migraines aside, with Garnet on the job, I think the Aloha-Oe will be back on its feet or wheels or pads or whatever in no time." Dandy exclaimed.

"Yup." Pearl said noncommittally. There was the urge to tap her foot to whittle away the minutes, but doing that with her left could cause her to lose balance and doing that with her right would just make her toes lightly tap the side of Dandy's neck. She settled for crossing her arms over her chest, not wanting to embarrass herself any further.

"That said, wanna know what I'm hunting this time?" Dandy asked eagerly.

The question almost caused Pearl to stumble back in shock. Did he not understand that she was going to send him packing the moment his ship was operational? How had he maintained the impression that he was welcome here and that she was going to let him stay and turn her home inside out with his blundering? Was nearly taking his head off with her spear and sending Lion to eat him too subtle?!

"I don't think that would really matter at this point." She tried to say, but Dandy wasn't having it.

"It's a real doozy, possibly one of the most dangerous things I've ever gone after." Dandy boasted. "Even its name strikes fear and sizable apprehension in the hearts of all who hear it."

He didn't tell her the name right away, most likely fishing for her to ask what it was. She considered staying silent, but he always took that as an invitation to keep talking. She could tell him that she wasn't interested, but then he'd take that as a challenge to embellish what he had to say to make it so. There really was no way to shut Dandy up when he was on a roll. Except kill him. Yeah, she really should just kill him now.

"It's called a Slammerhead." He finished.

If doing so wasn't beneath her, Pearl would've snorted. "You made that up."

"Feh, you wish. This ain't no snipe hunt, baby. We're chasing down one of the most elusive and nastiest barracudas of the stars." Dandy scoffed, pointing a finger up the heavens. He then went into brisk and spotty detail about his quarry to the initially disinterested Pearl, who was becoming increasingly alarmed that the alien he was describing matched the one she and the other Gems had encountered the previous night.

As Dandy has a tendency to skip vital pieces of information and exaggerate others, it may be prudent to briefly explain the nature of Slammerheads to the extent that space zoologists understand them. Slammerheads are large, bipedal, winged creatures that fly through space alone or in small packs. Their most prominent features, as you might have guessed, are their immense, rectangular craniums used for smashing into prey, people, asteroids, spaceships, robots, restaurants, malls, pets, furniture, fine art, malls with restaurants, restaurants with malls, and foreplay. While you wouldn't want to encounter one in open space, a Slammerhead is at its most dangerous when it is entering a planet's atmosphere. Or to be precise, when it is falling through a planet's atmosphere. Animal sympathizers may be pleased to know that because of its incredibly dense and heat-resistant body, the Slammerhead will come out of this eventuality none the worse for wear. Whatever it crashes into, and everything in a three mile radius, will not.

Minerals found around these impact sites suggested that Slammerheads did this to create Lonsdaleite-a crystal they used for attracting mates-by lodging a large quantity of Graphite in their faces and then slamming into the surface of a planet headfirst. These findings caused many to regard Slammerheads as little more than wild, stupid animals; easily avoided with a good ship and easily exterminated with a high-quality laser cannon. But as the decades rolled on, those that still bothered to study these creatures began to notice that their actions weren't all that dumb in spite of how savage they seemed to be. Specifically, they had a tendency to aim for small habitations on any world they crashed on, those that didn't benefit from land-based anti-air weaponry or lay in a planetary defense system's blindspot. These towns didn't have many survivors, corpses, or objects of monetary value left by the time a Slammerhead flew back into space. It wasn't until a Slammerhead tried to get a table at Restaurant le Meteorice without a reservation, bit a waiter's head off, and then escaped with his wallet, that the galactic public realized that these acts of orbital bombardment-flavored violence weren't just brutal, but calculated. This caused a renewed interest in the species among the scientific community, who eventually passed the buck to the alien hunter set because getting up close and personal with something that was both vicious and intelligent isn't a very smart thing to do.

Slammerheads aren't all that rare. However, due to their disturbingly high levels of aggression and sporadic moments of cunning, it is rather difficult to capture one alive for study. To sweeten the deal, some scientists may pay up to half-a-million wulongs in grant (and from the truly desperate, trust fund) money for a live specimen vis-à-vis the Alien Registration Center. Alien hunters became a lot more careful with Slammerheads from then on, though this delicacy was not reciprocated in the slightest. To capture one of these sinister, slippery monsters, it was clear that you'd need a man of formidable courage, might, and intelligence to get the job done. Ostensibly, this is where Dandy came in.

The moment he mentioned how much a live Slammerhead was worth, Pearl said with much satisfaction. "That was all very fascinating, Dandy. But I'm afraid you're out of luck. It's all ready been handled."

This brought Dandy's assortment of charades and animal noises to a merciful halt. "What? When?!"

"Last night." Pearl beamed. "Its attempt to, as you put it, 'face slam and mutilate big time' was thwarted by a group effort among the Crystal Gems as masterfully planned by yours truly." She explained, a flourish of her fingers accentuating the last of her words.

Instead of the howls of disappointment or panic she had expected of him, Dandy remained quiet as he processed her words. "Where's the body?"

"Probably at the bottom of the ocean somewhere." She said dismissively, making a show of checking her nails to stress how little she cared about him losing his prize.

She was shaken out of her display by a loud whoop from Dandy. "SCORE!" he cheered, pumping his fist into the air.

"How does that qualify as a score?!" Pear demanded. No doubt because he didn't have to do anything that required actual effort today sans departing.

"Weren't you listening, Pearl?" Dandy wagged a chastising finger at her in a way that made Pearl want to cut it off. "Slammerheads get really buoyant when they die. Something about gases and their twelve bladders turning them into cadaver balloons."

"You never mentioned that."

"Maybe, but I'm mentioning it now." Dandy said. "If its horrifying corpse hasn't washed up on shore, then it's probably underwater trying to heal up before it attacks Beach City again."

Leave it to Dandy to sabotage the beginnings of a good mood, Pearl thought. "Why would it try a second time? We all ready beat it once," Sure it turned out they had been lucky, but armed with what she nowknew about the Slammerhead, a second victory would be a certainty instead of a fluke.

"Didn't I tell y-."

"NO."

"Slammerheads are really persistent predators. If they've scoped out a settlement they want to munch on and don't succeed the first time, they'll just keep on trying until they get it right or get dead." He quickly explained.

"That's insanity."

"Or perseverance. Persistence is weird like that."

Arguably true. Pearl would have to discuss this paradox with someone more intelligent later. "Whatever the case." She began, looking behind Dandy to see how far along the others, specifically Garnet and Amethyst, were with putting the Aloha-Oe back in position. "It's no longer your concern." There was a muted, earthy splash as the Aloha-Oe's landing gear hit the sand, followed by the dusting of palms and quiet applause coming from QT and Meow. "Goodbye Dandy." She said with unmistakable finality, lowering her leg at last, but still poised to lash out with another kick if need be.

It was the out that Dandy had been praying for since he had been discovered. But the opportunity flew over his head. Or maybe he sidestepped it. Either way, he didn't move. "You know, I don't have to leave right this instant. We'd catch this thing a lot faster if we teamed up again. It'd be just like old times." he offered.

Pearl's answer was hushed, but firm. "That's what I'm afraid of."

It was faint, but Dandy heard it all the same. His stature, which had grown tall and confident with each passing moment he wasn't brutally harmed, deflated instantly with his once sanguine expression collapsing into one of subdued discomfort. He raised a hand to her as if to speak, but she cut him off.

"This isn't the first time I've had to clean up one of your messes, but I promise you, it will be the last," she took in a deep breath. What she wouldn't give to just feel anger and anger alone without all these other emotions dulling the blade of her consternation. "So leave. I know that's one thing you're good at."

Now she wasn't even looking at him anymore. "All right." Dandy muttered, bringing a hand to his communicator. "I guess this was a huge mistake after all."

"At least that's something we can agree on." Pearl noted, staring in the direction of the temple. Steven had probably reached it by now and doubtless, he'd want her to explain this whole ghastly episode to him. "Shouldn't you be walking back to your ship?"

"Hang on, I'm just turning on the engines." Dandy explained as he pressed a few buttons on his bracelet. "Warming them up so I can leave quicker once we get on the ship." His spirits briefly rose as he remembered how he had used this remote control function to freak out those naysayers a few hours ago.

As if to verify this statement, the spherical backend of the Aloha-Oe sputtered to life. The graphene rings around its surface were starting to light up. There was a gentle hum filling the air as the craft's systems were roused from sleep. Sure, there was a thin trail of smoke coming out from it, but no one but Pearl was all that worried.

"Um…Dandy?"

"I'm going, I'm going," he assured, his back still turned to the Aloha-Oe. "Just need to make a couple more adjustments and it'll be online before you can say-."

***POshZZZZZZzzzzzzzBAM!***

'Explosion' is a very loaded word, full to bursting in fact. Ever since its creation, it has been a source of unending anxiety. When someone hears the word 'explosion', what immediately comes to mind are the understandable questions of "How close?" and "How large?" The second of these is actually the more important of the two as without it being solved the assumed answer is always 'ENORMOUS'. So if one were to read, "The engine of the Aloha-Oe exploded", the first thing to come to mind would be an enormous blast wave engulfing everyone around it and perhaps the rest of Beach City. Lots of heat, a little screaming, and total annihilation.

It is thus prudent to mention that while there was a very loud and sudden explosion that made Amethyst, Meow, and QT duck for cover, it wasn't all that big; a flash, a bang, and more smoke coming out of the new medium-sized hole on its spherical surface. If you wanted specifics from someone familiar with spaceship maintenance like Pearl or QT, they'd tell you that the lack of a completely destroyed spaceship was indicative of mild internal damage; the spacecraft equivalent of blowing a gasket or something equally, but not catastrophically, vital.

Dandy, who had brought his hands up to protect his face and hair after hearing the sound, lowered his arms to survey the damage and immediately understood. Thus proving that you didn't need to be a rocket scientist to know that the Aloha-Oe wasn't going anywhere.

"Erm…would you guys mind us staying at your place for a couple of days?"

* * *

><p>After arriving home, Steven resisted the urge to look out the window to see what was going on. He had even decided against looking back as he rode Lion, who was now gobbling up the last of Meow's pizza in a corner, home. It wasn't because of a cessation of interest, but more out of respect - and just a little bit of fear - of Pearl. He suspected that whatever happened between her and Dandy was not something she wanted him to see. Had he not resisted that urge, he might've seen her coming.<p>

"Why isn't this door locked?!" she demanded, slamming and locking it behind her as she entered.

Because we never really lock it, he wanted to say. But seeing that she was alone, what came out was, "What about Garnet and Amethyst?"

There was a knock at the door.

Blushing, Pearl turned the nob to let her fellow Crystal Gems in.

"Tsk. Tsk. 'Fraid that'll be coming out of your paycheck, Jeeves." Amethyst reprimanded.

"Now's not the time for that, Amethyst." Pearl said as she shut the door. "Now is the time to board up the windows and bolt in those dead-locks I've been meaning to install."

For their own reasons, Amethyst and Steven didn't take this very well. Amethyst groaned because she didn't appreciate the extra tedium. Steven found it worrisome because something that could drive Pearl to such precautions and not make her instantly hysterical was probably a force to be reckoned with. "Are we being attacked by zombies?" he asked fearfully.

Despite her irritable frustration nary a moment before, the tone of Pearl's response was more firm than ferocious. "No Steven, not today," she said. "And I can assure you, this isn't a permanent arrangement. It's only until Dandy's ship gets…fixed."

"Did you break it?" Steven asked despite knowing what the answer would be.

Pearl might've gone into great detail about technicalities and the allocation of blame had Garnet not replied for her. "Yup."

"ANYWAY." Pearl said, casting an unusually harsh look in Garnet's direction. "We should grab the boat and head back to the beach. I can fix the engine with QT after we take care of the…Slammerhead. I can't believe that's actually what it's called. It's so unscientific. Then Dandy will be gone and we can put this whole thing behind me. Us. Behind us."

No one moved, at least, not in the way Pearl wanted them to. Garnet crossed her arms, Amethyst plopped herself into the sofa and did her best to sink into it as far and deeply as she could, and Steven was looking away and scratching his head, preparing himself for what he'd say next.

"Why?" Steven asked.

"Because he's a moron and a menace who is best forgotten." She answered curtly.

"Okay," Steven acquiesced, even though Dandy didn't seem to be all that bad. A little petty and full of himself, but not exactly a menace. "But why do you know him?"

"That's irrelevant." Pearl said.

Amethyst snorted. "If it's so 'irrelevant', then I guess it doesn't really matter if we get rid of him or not."

"That does matter!"

"How?" Garnet asked sternly. Pearl's fierce stance faltered under her gaze, but refused to wilt completely. "Pearl, please. Help us understand."

Pearl groaned. She really didn't want to do this. To explain was to recall and to recall demanded that in some small way, she'd have to relive the titanic farce she had been a part of. "Remember that…incident from eight years ago? When I was dragged into space during our battle with the Shatterlite?"

That got Amethyst's attention. "Oh yeah, that creepy metal grubbing monster gem. You know it only dragged you up there because you wouldn't let go like me and Garnet told you to." She fondly remembered constantly pelting Pearl with 'I told you so' for hours after she had returned.

'Garnet and I,' Pearl wanted to correct, but more than that, she desired to be done with this as quickly as possible. "It turned out there was an old star drive in the junkyard it was arming itself in. When we broke through the upper atmosphere, the Shatterlite warped us somewhere far away from Earth."

Steven was aghast. His mind raced as it tried to remember that far back. Pearl had always seemed to be there for him. Mostly. Had he taken that fact for granted? Was that the reason he hadn't noticed her vanishing from the town? From the planet? He did vaguely recall Amethyst and Garnet telling him that Pearl was on a "special mission" after he had asked where she was, but that was pretty much it.

Pearl continued. "My body couldn't hold out and I retreated into my Gem. Eventually, almost instantly, it was picked up by Dandy. No doubt so he could pawn, sell, or hoard it," she paused to give Steven a look of unbridled, bittersweet affection. "Imagine my relief at finding out that not a lot of time had passed while I was in stasis." Soon after, an unmistakable harshness replaced this serene melancholy. "After a brief…altercation, wherein he tried to get me registered."

"Like marriage registered?" Amethyst asked.

"NO! I mean, no…nothing like that." Pearl cleared her throat, which was free of any sort of obstruction. "After he FAILED to do that, we made a deal of sorts."

"Just like that?" Garnet stated, more than inquired.

"Yes."

If anyone could've peered through Garnet's thick visor, they might've seen the beginnings of skepticism playing at her brow. "He tried to get you…registered, failed to do that, and then you just made a deal with him."

"More or less, that is what happened." Pearl said. "The arrangement was simple. He'd help me find and capture the Shatterlite and I'd help him apprehend whatever rare aliens we encountered along the way."

Amethyst could never be bothered to remember all, or most, of the names the others assigned to the wretches they fought, but she could always recall when they came out of fights empty-handed. "But you never caught the Shatterlite. You said so yourself after you came back." She looked to Garnet, keeper of the room where they contained the dormant remains of their vanquished foes, who nodded.

"So you can probably guess how that arrangement turned out." She seemed much older and more tired in countenance than when she began. "We went our separate ways and I eventually got back to the temple. As I said, I was glad not a lot of time had passed. Just a month or so longer than half-a-year." she finished. Thankfully, this appeared to be enough for Garnet and Amethyst. Her explanation had been sensible and clear, if a little brief. They'd know that she had told them the truth. Well, most of the truth, essentially the entirety of what had transpired. That was enough. It should've been enough. Steven seemed to think otherwise.

"Why did he want to catch rare aliens?"

Pearl ran a hand down her face. She could deal with this. She could answer one or two more questions. "It's because he's an alien hunter, Steven. He travels to faraway worlds, encounters rare and exotic alien beings…and then captures them for money."

"Like a Hokey-Mon poacher!" Steven noted.

"I suppose?" Pearl said, unsure of how comfortable she was of having her weird and exhausting misadventures compared to the lighthearted digital exploits of truants that threw capture cubes at feral animals.

"That's pretty cool. How many did you guys catch?"

In an instant, Pearl's hands were around Steven's shoulders. She no longer looked fatigued, but alarmed, even a little afraid. "Steven, it is most certainly not cool," she said urgently. "It's why I had such a strong…reaction to seeing you so close to him at the beach."

There was a nearby chuckle. "Oh so now it's Steven's fault that your ex can't leave like you wanted him to?"

Steven hoped that this wasn't the case. "So he's an alien hunter, what's that got to do with me? He didn't manage to register you." He pointed out.

"That's because I'm a Gem, Steven. For whatever reason, the Alien Registration Center doesn't accept beings that are primarily mineral or vegetable," she explained, tapping the large, oval pearl on her forehead.

"Then why should I worry? I'm a Gem too."

"Steven, you're HALF-gem and HALF-human. You're a hybrid." At this, the grip she had on Steven's shoulders tightened. "And the only one in existence. That's ambrosia to any alien hunter's pocketbook. Especially one as greedy and unscrupulous as Dandy,"

Steven hadn't thought of that. He hoped that Dandy hadn't either. There were some very telling differences between him and the other Gems if you knew what to look for. There was also a second hope, a little smaller, but one that ached to be expressed. Who knew? It might even calm Pearl down. "Maybe he's changed over the last eight years."

The edge in her voice returned. "I doubt it." she looked at the door with nervous suspicion. "That's why we need you to stay behind, here, at the temple. You have to promise me that you won't set one foot out that door until we get back, okay?" Pearl pleaded.

"Pearl, I really don't think-."

"Steven…please. Please promise me."

Her gaze was on him again. It was sorrowful, frustrated, and impossible to resist. "All right, Pearl. I promise."

Pearl's face brightened. "Good," she sighed with relief as she stood up and took her hands off of his shoulders. "Just stay where Lion can reach you and you can do anything you want. You can make yourself some snacks, read books, watch TV, play games, and if something does manage to break in, you can always use the warp pad to flee," she tried to skirt past the last of those options. "It shouldn't come to that though. We'll take Dandy, QT, and that cat thing with us on our search and I won't let any of them out of my sight."

"Yeah, that might be a problem."

Had that come from anyone other than Garnet, Pearl might've waved it off or ignored it completely. But Garnet had said those words, and that brought a charley horse to the popliteal fossa of her rising spirits.

"It might be a little snug, but I think we could all fit on the boat. Amethyst and I can shrink down if need be." She assured, hoping that was what Garnet was referring to.

Garnet shook her head, dashing those hopes. "That's not it. I can't see when he's around."

"Come now, Garnet. I know he's a bit of an eyesore, but I don't think he's obnoxious to the point of blinding. He comes close though." She laughed nervously. Garnet did not join in. Instead she pointed to the upper center-most portion of her shades, the part of the accessory that shielded her third eye. "You can't be serious." Pearl sputtered. Regretfully, Garnet nodded. "No, no, no, no. How? Why?!"

It was always painful for Garnet to see her friend in such a frantic and confused state. It was almost as painful as not being able to provide an answer or solution that would snap her out of it. "When I arrived at the beach, I kept trying to use my powers to see what the future had in store for this…Dandy," she said, leaving out the little detail that she wanted to see all the myriad of ways things could go wrong for him once Pearl finally arrived.

"He negated your clairvoyance?" Pearl asked, horrified. Steven and Amethyst were similarly shocked.

"No, it was more like using it around him created this weird sort of sensory feedback. Looking directly at him was like…there was a…Dandy-shaped distortion where he was supposed to be," she explained. 4D white noise was never pleasant. It was very much like all your senses had been taken out of your body and then dragged across a desert made of sandpaper. Even trying to explain it was giving her a headache. And this wasn't even going into all the other weird inconsistencies she had seen like the oceans filled with hair and the burning tetrahedron clouds. "The closer he got, the worse it became."

"How near does he need to be for this to happen?!"

"Not much." Garnet stated bluntly. "Even now, I'm still getting a bit of interference."

"Well isn't that just TYPICAL!" Pearl growled, throwing her arms up in the air. "He manages to ruin everything by just being there!"

"How do you think that's possible?" Steven asked. Garnet's powers of perception weren't perfect, but as far as he knew, they had never outright failed before.

"Oh what does it matter?!" Pearl yelled. "I guarantee that the explanation is something embarrassing and inane. He probably stuck his foot in a tachyon toilet or burned himself with a hadron hairdryer!"

Amethyst was pretty sure that neither or those things actually existed and the other pieces of reality-altering furniture Pearl started to list seemed equally implausible. "So you've got a plan to get around that, right?" Amethyst asked. "Because I'm not too wild about going in blind against something that survived a rocket Garnet knuckle sandwich."

This brought an end to Pearl's histrionics. "A plan?"

"Duh. You've always got one and it is kind of your fault that Garnet's powers are glitching out since you did wreck Dandy's ship."

"I know that!" Pearl screeched. "I just-I-I-I-!" she was breathing heavily now, her hands gripping the sides of her hair in worry. "I need time to think." she said, trying to mask the pleading in her voice; pleading for time, answers, and the return of chances and certainties now lost to her. "I need time to think!" she almost screamed as she ran for the door that lay beyond the warp pad. Before anyone could stop her, the portal had slammed shut.

* * *

><p>For the next few minutes, Pearl didn't do much actual thinking. There was a powerful urge to howl at the room's ceiling and kick its wet floors, but that's not how she did things. That wasn't what she wanted to be. Instead, she settled for performing a series of quick and furious katas. They didn't give her the amount of visceral satisfaction that yelling and violence did, but she felt that she had humiliated herself enough for one day. As she gradually allowed herself to reflect on these moments of weakness, the speed and force of her actions intensified.<p>

Reckless.

Ronde de jambe.

Impulsive.

Slash.

Shortsighted.

Plié.

What had she been thinking?

Fouetté.

Not a whole lot, that much was clear.

Kick.

And look where that had gotten her.

Retiré.

Garnet blinded.

Rond de jambe á terre.

Dandy stuck here.

Elbow.

A monster in the ocean ready to strike.

Revoltade.

Why had she done that?

Stab.

That craven reprobate looked like he would've fled if she had just looked at him harshly.

Brisé.

It was all her fault.

Sissone.

Nothing seemed to go right.

Tendu.

When she had completed the improvised dance, she was satisfied to see that the spear in her hands was completely in focus now. It had been a blurry, flickering mess when she had began and its restoration indicated that for the moment, her concentration had been restored. Still, she had to work fast. Her repertoire had helped flush out much of her self-loathing and despair, but she could feel a rising cloud of anger trying to take their place.

She took a deep breath to calm herself. Anger, however righteous it had been, was what had gotten her into this mess to begin with. She listened to the multitude of fountains elegantly arranged around her room. Letting the rhythmic melody of surging water quiet the accusations and curses stewing inside her head. Those cascading curtains of moisture couldn't give her an answer, but they gave her a structure to work towards; amorphous, chaotic components turned into something whole and polished with the right amount of force and intelligent design.

With a wave of her hand, a bubble the size of a coconut rose from the depths of the watery bloom she was standing on. She hadn't looked at its contents since she had chucked it down there eight years ago. Hidden, beyond the sight of herself and her fellow Gems, she had hoped for it and everything associated with the bauble to fade completely from memory. She knew that wasn't likely, it had been built to withstand much colder and harsher environments than this. If she had been serious about wanting it gone, she'd have destroyed it outright. Provided that she had wanted to forget everything it symbolized instead of just a significant amount of the beginning and end, she might've just done that.

She wrapped the problem around its flawed curvature and had the object gently spin in front of her. An uneven glint cast by its rotation could spark new insights and eureka might spring forth from the growing-shrinking-vanishing-growing hole at its center

Dandy couldn't come with them. That much was certain. They were almost half-a-mile from him and Garnet still couldn't use her abilities to give them even an inkling of where the…Slammerhead might be. She thought about putting him on a smaller boat and towing it behind theirs, but she still didn't know how far he needed to be for the interference to stop happening. They could always leave him on the beach and take Steven with them, but Steven couldn't fight underwater like they could and fighting the creature while trying to protect him made this option unfeasible. Knocking Dandy out, tying him up, and then burying him up to his neck in the sand until they got back was starting to look like their best option, but that might've just been the anger talking again. Besides, Dandy could be incredibly resourceful - or absurdly lucky - when he was cornered. At the same time, she couldn't just let him have the run of the place, not when Steven was still there.

Yes, Dandy was lazy and unmotivated, but trying to stop him from doing something was a surefire way to make him try it. Provided of course, it wasn't too much trouble. So they couldn't possibly bring him along on the hunt, but letting him go free was a terrible idea. She needed him contained, but he had to be tricked into wanting to be contained. Actually, that wasn't entirely true. Things would probably go a lot smoother if she could get him contained without him knowing he was being contained. No, that'd be impossible. She didn't think much of his intelligence, but even she knew that Dandy wasn't so mentally inept as to not notice he was being confined. "But what if…" she wondered out loud. "What if he was trapped somewhere he wouldn't mind being stuck in? Like a pit bursting with money, or a penitentiary with an all-you-can-eat buffet, or a labyrinth full of supermodels, or his-."

That's when she saw it. Not in the brass. Not in the hole. It was in the gash. The miniature ravine that was simultaneously shallow and impossibly deep. The plan, no, the scheme she sought lay there in the rip where everything had fallen apart. The solution it housed was simple, utilitarian, and just a little bit stupid.

"How appropriate," she thought bitterly. But first, she'd need to gather a few things.

* * *

><p>"-so you understand? It's extremely important that you do." Pearl asked as they neared the disabled spacecraft.<p>

"For the last time, yes, I get it." Amethyst used one of her hands to lightly chop at the side of her neck as proof. "Why aren't you bugging Garnet about this a trillion times?"

"That's because I know that Garnet was listening to me." Pearl explained, turning to her taller comrade for confirmation.

Garnet shrugged, causing the sailboat she was carrying on her shoulder to bob up and down. "I got the broad strokes."

Pearl hoped that was just Garnet using her usual stoicism to act cheeky. "Well that will have to do," she said as they rounded the front of the Aloha-Oe to see Dandy and his crew standing by the shoreline. Garnet and Amethyst were less surprised than Pearl when they saw what QT was wearing. "QT…why are you wearing a fishing vest?"

"Oh, this?" QT tugged at the side of his dark green garment. "That's because I've taken up fishing as a hobby. It's actually really fun," he explained, raising the fishing rod in his other hand.

Pearl blinked. That was news to her. He hadn't been interested in much of anything besides cleaning things and making snide remarks when she had seen him last. "What about the sunglasses and baseball cap?"

"Those are just to complete the look." QT answered, tipping the brim of his hat.

In contrast to QT getting dressed for the occasion, Dandy's appearance was largely unchanged. Save for a big goofy grin on his face.

"What are you so happy about?" Pearl tried to sound more curious than harsh. On reflection, it was a question worth asking. He really didn't have a benign reason to be glad. His ship was grounded, she had refused him lodging at the temple, and as far as he knew, he was going to have to chase after something angry and dangerous. A smile like that could only mean that something worse was about to happen or was happening to someone else. Come to think of it, Meow wasn't anywhere to be found.

Instead of answering, Dandy let out a rough giggle as he reached behind him. There was a yelp of protest as he yanked Meow to the forefront for all of them to see. And there was so much of Meow to see. At least, everyone thought so. The only indications that this big, fluffy mass of untidy curls and shocks of fur was Meow at all were the clothes all of the fuzz was sticking out of and its angry yellow eyes. None of the Gems knew what to make of it. Then one of his ears twitched, causing a swift and very visible pulse of hairy movement to cascade from it.

"Heh." Garnet snicked.

This was more than enough to set Amethyst off. "HAHAHAHAHAHA!" she laughed, doubling over, but making sure she never lost sight of Meow.

Dandy and QT were next, oblivious or uncaring of their crewmate's growing annoyance at the situation. Pearl's cheeks were puffed with air as they tried to stop her from expressing an impolite storm of vocal schadenfreude.

"It's not funny!" Meow protested as the laughter persisted.

Seeing the angry pink triangle flash into being amidst the bulb of fluff where Meow's head used to be was too much and Pearl finally joined the others in mocking him. This was fantastic, she thought as the guffaws shrank into chuckles. This was just the cover she needed for her temperament to do a complete 180 with Dandy being none the wiser. It helped that seeing Meow ring like a giant wooly bell was genuinely funny to her. "How did this even happen?" she asked, the words tinged with the ghost of a giggle.

Dandy wiped a mirthful tear from his eye. "We hosed him down after you left to get rid of the slobber. And once he got dry-," he motioned to the very visible results and let out another guffaw.

"It's not my fault!" Meow argued. "It's the damn humidity!"

"Why didn't you just lick the spit off?" Amethyst asked. It's what she would have done in cat form.

Meow gagged. Or maybe he spat. It was hard to tell with how puffy his face area was. "Lick it off? Gross! That'd be like I was frenching the damn lion!"

"She's got a point, Meow." QT chided. "How many people can honestly say that they made out with the KING of the Jungle?"

That got another chuckle from the Gems.

"Oh, so you think that's funny, do ya?!" Meow demanded as he furiously rubbed his paws together. "Well lets see how you three like it!" he threatened. The two furry nubs parted, both extremities now crackling with a modest electric charge.

Garnet tilted the boat on her shoulder so that the gunwale was pointing directly at the irked Betelgeusian. "Don't make me use this."

Meow could just picture Garnet's magnificent square afro exploding into a Bride of Frankenstein beehive at his touch. It was so easy to imagine Amethyst's wild locks being frozen into a hideous purple cloud attached to her scalp. Pearl wouldn't be that affected by it, but she seemed to be the type to have a Dandy-tier conniption over a few frayed ends. Alas, his anger wasn't great enough to shove aside his fear of being impaled by a sailboat. He grumbled, and then tapped Dandy and QT's shoulders with his paws, sending an unwelcome jolt into his unsuspecting cohorts.

"That wasn't nice!" QT complained, readjusting his glasses.

"Yeah, don't take it out on us." Dandy chastised as he rubbed his arm. Of course, Meow all ready had and his subsequent laughter at his petty retribution caused all the frazzled hairs on his body to tremble in pleasure.

Dandy was pretty annoyed when the Gems followed suit, though he was grateful that their merriment wasn't as loud or as long as it had been when he had shown them the new and expanded Meow. In addition, now that he and QT weren't laughing along with everyone else, he could actually hear Pearl's laughter among those of the four. It was a light and melodious sound that was just a little bit haughty; not haughty in a snobbish way, mind you. It was a laugh that said, "I really shouldn't, but I absolutely must and I feel deliciously objectionable because of it." A little irritating if it was directed at you, but Dandy thought it was a nice change of pace from her angry and dismal shrieks from a few hours ago. That had to be a good sign, right?

"Well now that we've got that all out of our systems." Dandy said after the laughter had died down. "Let's get that fancy, magic tub of yours into the sea and hunt us a Slammerhead."

"Um…Dandy?" Pearl said. "Don't you think that you should fix your hair first?"

Dandy raised a hand to check. Meow's little static prank had caused several shocks of hair to spring out of the less heavily gelled areas of his scalp. "Yeah, that's a bit annoying, but I don't see the point in fixing it. I mean, present company excluded," he winked at Pearl and the other Gems. "Who'd there be to impress out there in open water?"

"Mermaids." Pearl stated.

"Mermaids?"

Pearl nodded. "Beach City has had a long history of mermaid sightings since it was founded. I've never seen one myself, but from what I've heard, they're quite fetching."

He suddenly felt very self-conscious about his untidy hairdo. "QT, is that true?"Dandy asked the bespectacled robot.

"Let me check." QT said as he scanned the outernet with his processors to verify or debunk Pearl's claim. "There certainly are a lot of stories about mermaids being spotted around this area."

Meow scoffed, launching a burst of dander from his new pink triangle mouth. "You can't seriously believe any of that. This is a coastal town; of course it's going to have tall tales about sea monsters and ocean babes."

"Stranger things have happened to us, Meow. And we've seen plenty of actual mermaids out there in space." Dandy reminded as he tried to bring his errant streaks of hair down with no success. "None of them single though."

"Even if there were any on this planet, they wouldn't have…y'know." Meow paws came to his hips and proceeded to do some downward fanning motions.

"Some guys get their kicks above the waistline, feline." Dandy said, pressing a button on his communicator. A moment later, a large metal platform lowered itself from the Aloha-Oe's keel. "I'll just be a second."

"Just to be on the safe side, make sure you bring along lots of extra hair gel." Pearl offered as Dandy stepped onto the loading pad. "The saltwater air can play havoc on your locks."

Part of the alien hunter knew that he should've been at least a little bit suspicious of how nice and helpful Pearl had suddenly become. However, that part of him was rarely any fun. The way Dandy saw it, people complained about bad crap happening to them all of the time. Then when things started to look up, those same people had the temerity to question their good fortune. Best to enjoy the joyride while there was gas in the tank, regardless of how inexplicable or unearned the trip was. "Thanks, Pearl," he grinned in appreciation as he was lifted up. Pearl smiled back and kept smiling until the platform was completely raised back into the ship. Then she snapped her fingers.

Meow and QT didn't really understand what happened afterwards. It occurred with such speed that they could barely claim to have experienced it. For the next few seconds, there was a continuous ripping sound as Pearl, Garnet, and Amethyst leapt, weaved, and ran across the entirety of the Aloha-Oe. When the Gems were done, the two bounty hunters were startled to see that there was a frighteningly enormous amount of duct tape tied around the circumference of their ship and some of its other sections on the side.

"I can't believe he fell for your forced acting." Amethyst smirked as she surveyed their handiwork.

"I can't believe there were people feverish enough to mistake you for a mermaid." Pearl shot back.

"You're the one that called her fetching." Garnet pointed out as she lifted the sailboat she had dropped at the start of the maneuver back onto her shoulder.

QT reviewed the footage of what he had just seen, getting an idea of what they did, but not why. "Um, what was that all about?" he asked.

Pearl turned to face him. "I'm going to be quick, so listen up. Garnet has heightened powers of perception that can help us find the Slammerhead faster. For reasons I'm too livid to contemplate right now, Dandy's very presence causes those powers to short out. We can't bring him along, but I don't want him stirring up trouble, so we've locked him in there."

"There's no way that'll hold him once he finds out you what you did." QT meekly protested.

"Why do you think we didn't cover up any of the windows?" Pearl asked. QT looked behind her. Indeed, all of the ship's windows were free of tape. Which was just as well, since none of them could afford you a decent view of the ship itself. It was almost as if they were positioned in such a way as to prevent the Aloha-Oe's crew from seeing how cruddy the ship they were flying in was while they were inside of it. "Let's face it, if Dandy had an excuse not to come along so he could kick back and relax while we did his work for him, he'd take it." Neither Meow nor QT could refute that point. "If he thinks he can't come along, he won't because he never wants to. So these are your choices: Immortal Psychic Veteran Warrior who has vanquished countless foes over several millennia," she gestured toward Garnet. "Or Dandy." at this, she just wagged her palm at them.

A choice such as this would've been a no-brainer if the situation was as simple as it implied. The former, please, please, please, give me the former. I actually want a decent chance of success this time around, they'd say. And yet, while they didn't doubt that Garnet was every bit as mighty as Pearl said she was, none of the Gems would have to deal with a very peeved Dandy if he ever found out about the deception.

As they mulled over their options, there was a groan from the bottom of the Aloha-Oe as the platform tried to lower itself to no avail. It tried again a second time, then a third.

Meow's communicator started to beep. "Y-yeah?" he answered.

"Meow? I can't seem to get the landing pad down. Is something out there blocking it?" Dandy's voice asked from the bangle.

"N-nothing I can see." Meow replied. It was true in a way. Being tied up wasn't the same as being obstructed, right?

"I'm gonna try the-." There was a mechanized retching from another heavily duct taped part of the ship. "No, the air lock's stuck too." Then came a banging from one side of the ship, followed by a lesser banging from the one not facing the group. "Starboard and portside doors ain't budging either. Huh."

"It's probably because the ship got damaged when Pearl flipped it over." QT said, trying to allay Dandy's burgeoning suspicions.

"I guess that makes sense." Dandy said. "At least the backup generator still works." From Meow's communicator, the murmur of sports statistics, followed by a lover's quarrel, and the declaration of a Hrogbeast Parfait's completion indicated that the television was also functioning properly

"You want us try and uh-," the Betelgeusian looked to Pearl for guidance. She nodded. He didn't get what that meant, so he decided to wing it. "-try and get you out of there? QT says it could take a while."

The cooking show audio was replaced by the sound of gunfire and the skidding of tires. Hardly the tense, pensive pause Pearl thought would crop up once she maneuvered Dandy to this juncture. "Nah, just get me out of here once you guys are done. I think I've had enough excitement for one day," he said. "Besides, you've got Pearl to watch your backs. You'll be fine."

Since he was really just trying to slack off, Pearl tried not to feel complimented by what Dandy had said. She leaned forward to speak into Meow's communicator, trying to sound flattered, because she most definitely wasn't. "Don't worry, Dandy. We'll catch that Slammerhead of yours in no time," she assured, ending the transmission before Dandy or Meow had a chance to say anything more.

"Wait a second. Catch? I thought we were gonna make sure he left the planet empty ha-rahaughk!" Amethyst's puzzled inquiry was interrupted by Pearl wrapping her arm around her neck in an act of faux-camaraderie.

"Ohohoho, that's Amethyst for you!" Pearl tightened her chummy hold. "Always such a kidder!" she laughed nervously, ignoring struggles of the aforementioned 'kidder'.

The two individuals she was trying to fool couldn't find it in themselves to be alarmed by this blatant deception. Meow simply wanted this day to be over. For him to board the Aloha-Oe, away from prying and judgmental eyes as he worked to get his fur back under control. QT was just itching to get some actual fishing done. It had been months since he had caught his last wall-hanger and Dandy staying behind would make their vessel less of a cattle boat. Best case scenario, even if you took inflation into account, half-a-million wulongs was still a hell of a lot more than thirty pieces of silver. And if worse came to worst, they'd have front row seats to the Gems flashily beating one of the most unpleasant creatures in the universe to death.

There were no objections when Garnet lowered the boat into the water and urged those assembled to get inside of it. Once everyone had boarded, she pushed it past the shallows before effortlessly vaulting onto it herself. Pearl was immeasurably pleased that things were finally going smoothly. As a sore and still grumbling Amethyst unfurled the sails, Pearl couldn't help but think that the day might not wind up a total disaster after all.

* * *

><p>Steven raised his fingers to play with a dot of light that had managed to squeeze through the boards the Gems had nailed to all of the windows. He derived some amusement from thinking that the rays were running across his palm as he turned it. The house was rather dark after its heavy and hasty fortification. He thought about turning on the lights, but it just seemed like a waste when there was a bright sunny day just outside the door. Plus, it wasn't dark enough that it was impossible to see.<p>

"Alley-oop," he cried as he got off of the couch. He then started to walk around the room, whistling all the way in an effort to fill the place with some kind of sound. Perhaps he could trick himself into thinking he was doing something fun or productive. He might even manage to wake Lion, who was deeply occupied with one of his post-pizza naps.

He opened and closed the fridge, whose contents hadn't changed since he had made himself lunch. A few minutes were spent leafing through books and old comics; he even tried opening some of the big dusty ones that Pearl or Garnet would sometimes look at. It didn't last, he felt too distracted and restless to read. TV. TV might work, he thought as he climbed up the steps to his part of the house.

Nothing. Nothing he hadn't seen before or cared to see anyway. Just replays, reruns, and news bulletins. A second showing of the Under the Knife second season finale made him think of giving Connie a call, but he knew he'd be no fun if she picked up. So he wasn't hungry, he couldn't concentrate on reading, and there was nothing to watch on television. That left video games as the sole remaining option in Pearl's list of things he could do while he waited for the Gems to come back.

He groaned. Great, now he was thinking about how troubled and exhausted she had looked. Even when she had exited her room and calmly told them her plan, he could still sense the anger and stress rumbling beneath her cool façade. But that was nothing compared to the colossal melancholy that hung from her every word and action since she had confronted Dandy. Steven couldn't believe that not being able to catch that Shatter-thing would be enough to fill Pearl with so much sadness, even if she had a habit of taking things too seriously sometimes. To carry such pain for all this time without telling him or her closest friends, clearly there was something she wasn't telling them. Maybe she'd never tell them.

As Steven loaded the Dogcopter 3 tie-in game into his console, he tried to tell himself that further contemplation wouldn't help. Yes, it was a shame that he'd probably never find out what had happened between Dandy and Pearl. There was nothing he could do though. Given how reluctant she was to glance over even a smidgen of their history, it was unlikely that Pearl was going to tell him more. And the only other person that could shed some light on this shady matter was unwittingly trapped in his own ship.

As he picked up the controller, Steven noticed that the house's meager illumination was gradually turning pink. He turned his attentions to the common room, certain that Lion was the source only to see a pinprick of rose colored light suspended in the air. The radiant dot before him began to unfold, creating a tall fan of pure luminescence that expanded and contracted along unknowable contours until it hit the ground. Steven soon realized that this sheet of energy was shaped like a person. The moment he recognized this, the light had dissipated, leaving behind a familiar and unexpected presence.

"Say," Dandy said, pointing to the game that Steven was no longer paying any attention to. "That multiplayer?!"

* * *

><p><em>Pearl grimaced as she stared out of the cockpit window. According to the ship's badly organized logs, this was where she had been picked up. This was where the Shatterlite had passed through. Now there was nothing at all. No traces to follow, no clues she could pick up. Nothing. <em>

_She brought her hands to her face in frustration. It couldn't end this way. She hadn't clung to the abomination so fiercely just to let it run rampant throughout the cosmos. The cosmos…oh she couldn't bear to look at it. It was too distracting. She needed to focus; she needed to think. _

_Once she had gotten back on the ship, her first course of action was to continue her pursuit of the corrupted Gem, but the trail had gone cold if it had ever been warm at all. Carelessly, she wondered how long she had spent drifting out there in open space, surrounded by a galaxy she treasured, but couldn't see. She immediately regretted it. Untold years might've passed while she was in stasis. The computer was a hassle to sort through, but if she tried, she could find out the year, provided they still had years whenever she was. She should've done that first. The Earth might not even exist anymore. Amethyst, Garnet, and…Steven might've left for a different world. Or maybe they hadn't, she suppressed a sob. Or maybe they hadn't managed to-._

_The opening and closing of sliding doors interrupted her thoughts. _

"_Sup?" a bothersome voice frivolously asked._

_Pearl's hands fell away and she looked back to address the nuisance, only to see that it was the scoundrel that had tried to capture her. She tensed, anticipating another attack._

"_Whoah, whoah, whoah." He made a tapping gesture with his left hand, the one with the bracelet, as if he was trying to shoo away a bothersome dog instead of a potential attacker. "Easy. I didn't come here for a fight, baby."_

_Baby?_

_Not missing a beat, he went to the minifridge next to the pilot seat and pulled out a can of beer. "Regular fridge is empty," he explained. There was a hiss as he pulled the tab down to open it._

"_Wh-what took you so long to get here?" Pearl asked, puzzled._

"_It was too early for a nightcap," he said nonchalantly._

"_That's not what I'm talking about. I-I-," Pearl dragged a palm across her face as she tried to find the words that could bring this deranged moment under the heel of sanity. "I commandeered your ship."_

"_Comman-whu?"_

"_That means I took it from you," she explained._

"_So you're saying you stole it?" Pearl had the good grace to look a bit bashful as she nodded in response. "I hadn't noticed," he shrugged._

"_You didn't notice it flying around without you or your little robot friend at the controls?" Pearl warily asked. She suspected that he was being facetious, but given how truly foolish he had acted back when they were at that 'Alien Registration Center', she couldn't be sure._

"_I wouldn't call QT my friend, but that's about right." _

"_Okay, but now that you have noticed and now that you do know, what are you going to do about it?"_

_The man scratched his prominent chin and said. "I dunno. What do you think I should do?"_

_This nearly caused Pearl to fall out of her purloined seat. "Um, uh," she grappled with how best to respond to such a question. The others wouldn't have had such a hard time with this. Amethyst would have just brashly kicked this guy out of the airlock and Garnet would have fixed him one of those cold, sublime stares of hers until he got the message. "I wouldn't recommend fighting me for it. Especially when you're well within striking distance," she offered politely. As bizarre as this conversation was turning out to be, she was confident that at this range, his little fishing rod gadget would be near useless, while her own precise blows would be devastating._

"_Good point," the man conceded. "You did manage to punch your way through that super tough diamond glass. Not a lot of aliens can pull that off. Why, I remember this one time I caught a Wuzraition. After I finally got it in that canister, it got super peeved and tried to get out by firing a huge force beam out of its one eye. The tube came out of it perfectly fine, but its insides were slathered with Wuzraition chunks."_

"_Hang on, that wasn't the same canister that you put me in, was it?" _

"_So what if it was?"_

"_But you cleaned it thoroughly afterwards, right?" she asked with a hint of desperation._

_There was a pause. "Define thoroughly."_

"_Ah," Pearl gulped, remembering how she had slammed her shoulders, legs, and…and face into the glass. Repeatedly. "Ah…AH!"_

"_Tragedy at its starkest. Didn't get a single wulong out of that," he said wistfully._

_Pearl shivered in horror. "I-I think I'm going to be sick."_

"_That's impossible. You don't have organs."_

"_It's a mental disgust!" she shot back._

"_While we're on the subject of mental disorders, do you actually have any idea where you're going?" the man asked, putting his open beer on top of the minifridge to free up both his hands._

"_That depends," Pearl rubbed her left bicep uncertainly, steeling herself for the terrible revelation she might receive. "How is the Earth doing?"_

"_How would I know?"_

_She definitely wasn't prepared for that. "You're a human being! How wouldn't you know? Isn't that where you're from?!"_

"_Ehhhh, a bit, but not really," he brought his right thumb and index close together without letting them touch to illustrate. "I'm more of an aficionado of Earth culture than a bonafide citizen." _

"_I could tell," she stated, remembering the palm tree and all the Hawaiian and Japanese memorabilia she had passed on her way to the cockpit. "Doesn't that mean you should know whether or not it's still around though?"_

"_All right, fine, keep your tights on," he walked towards the cockpit's doors, causing them to slide apart. "HEY QT!" he shouted through the opening._

"_YEAH?!" a high-pitched synthesized voice from the other side answered._

"_WHAT'S THE STATUS OF PLANET EARTH?!"_

"_ONE SEC! Uh-huh, hm, ah, IT'S FINE!"_

"_THANKS!" the man yelled, before closing the door. _

"_That's a relief." Pearl sighed, though there was still one more question she needed answered for that to be completely true. "What year is it?"_

_This, the man didn't hesitate to answer. "Space Century 0006."_

"_Thank goodness." Pearl felt like laughing. She hadn't been gone that long after all!_

"_Geez, if you wanted to get back to Earth so bad, why'd you fly us here? This place is even further from it than the Alien Registration Center was."_

"_That's because-," she hesitated. "One moment, before I go any further, how are you even here?"_

"_QT picked me up with Aloha-Oe's big old claw arms, same as you," he reminded her. "I would've preferred that he zap us back, but the teleporter's been broken since forever, so what're you gonna do?"_

_Pearl was going to suggest he fix it, but if the thought hadn't occurred to him by now, chances were he'd never care enough to bother. "That's…but the no oxygen and the freezing and the-whatever," she gave up. "If you must know, I came here looking for the Shatterlite."_

"_What's a Shatterlite?"_

"_Not a Shatterlite, THE Shatterlite," she stressed. "It's this…um…dangerous alien my friends and I were trying to capture. I thought I could pick up its trail if I came back to where you found me, but no such luck," she slumped into the chair._

_A heavy, metal-soled boot slammed into the ship's helm, smashing her stupor wide open. "Well why didn't you say so from the beginning?!" the man asked, leaning into his propped up leg to look down at her. "If it's a chase you're on, I'll have you know that you're in the presence of an honest-to-goodness alien hunter!"_

_Pearl severely doubted he was all that honest or good. She tried to gingerly back away from his gaze, but the seat she was in wasn't designed for that. "Far be it from me to question your qualifications, but how would you go about finding it? Fly around without a clue and hope you stumble across its hiding place?"_

"_Almost crashed into it before," he boasted. "And I wasn't even looking for it back then."_

_Pearl considered this for a moment."Look, Luck or no luck, even if I did want to enlist your services, I don't think I'd be able to pay for them."_

_The alien hunter squinted at her with a level of scrutiny that bordered on the exaggerated. "Yeah, you don't seem to have any pockets in that getup of yours," he cupped his chin in the heel of his palm. "What to do, what to do," he pondered as he loudly and repeatedly tapped the foot still on the dash. As Pearl was starting to worry that he was damaging the controls, he snapped his fingers. "I've got it, we'll trade favors."_

"_Favors?"_

"_Yeah, quid pro quou, that sort of trade," he splayed a hand against the window. "Out there, between us and your Shatterthingie is a whole galaxy filled with rare and exotic aliens just ripe for the taking," he looked back at her with a smile. "So here's my pitch. I help you find it and in exchange, you help me catch any rare aliens we come across along the way with your freaky super strength. Sound good?"_

_Calling her strength freaky didn't sound good, nor did randomly zooming around space. She hadn't been up here in centuries and even if the alien hunter's continued survival indicated that he wasn't completely incompetent at navigating the stars, they still might never find it. The offer was really impractical, a foolish proposition to do a foolish thing. Pearl might have refused right then and there if the alien hunter hadn't said. "I saw how you were looking at the stars," his eyes took on a startling gentleness. "Been a while since you saw them like that?"_

"_Thousands of years…" she let slip._

"_Oooooo, Cougar Rock, eh?" he chortled as her face went from forlorn to indignant. "That just makes this deal even more perfect doesn't it? I get some hired muscle, and you get to explore dozens if not hundreds of worlds and star systems before coming home a hero!" _

_Pearl's displeasure turned to intrigue. It had been a long while since she had explored the great beyond. Hunting aliens couldn't have been all that different from what she usually did on Earth. She could travel for a few weeks with this clown and just go home if she didn't find the Shatterlite. Maybe this impromptu quest could even remove some of the built-up contempt she had for the little blue world she was stationed on._

_Seeing her seriously consider his deal encouraged the alien hunter to press on. "C'mon baby, it'll be fun. I can be the Intergalactic Ishmael to your All-Star Ahab."_

_That was a half-decent literary reference. Maybe the man wasn't as dumb as she thought he was. "What about QT?"_

"_He can be Queequeg. Since that also starts with a Q." he said. "Stick with us and we'll nab that Great White Dick of yours in no time."_

_Pearl blushed at the double entendre. Or perhaps it had been an accidental innuendo. It was really hard to tell with this guy. "I suppose a little adventure couldn't hurt."_

"_That's the spirit! It'll an awesome space adventure in space." Pearl didn't know whether to laugh or groan at the redundancy of that statement. "Since we'll be partners for the foreseeable future, I think introductions are in order." He put an elbow on his raised knee and then tilted his arm so that an open hand was pointed in her direction. "The name's Dandy, but you can call me Space Dandy."_

"_Pearl," she said, taking his hand in her own. As her fingers closed around Dandy's, she noticed that the tear she had seen on the right sleeve of his jacket earlier was gone. _

_Normally, when one's ship is stolen from them, one (provided they had survived the theft) would immediately try or think of a way to take it back by force or an act of sabotage. Defying protocol, Dandy had responded to Pearl shoving him to the ground and taking the Aloha-Oe's controls for herself by having a snack. The instant ramen was a poor substitute for the buffet he had originally planned to dig into that day, but it warmed him up and sated his hunger. Then he had a lonely finger of tequila, no lemon unfortunately, before taking a nice, long shower. This was followed by him brushing his teeth, fixing his hair, applying a tasteful dab of cologne, and putting on a fresh set of clothes. He even made time to have QT polish his boots until they shone._

_Pearl had no way of knowing this. Amidst a whirlwind of unexpected absurdity and bombastic negotiations, the only thing she noticed about Dandy's personage was that he looked a lot more presentable and didn't smell quite as bad. As she wondered why that was, she realized that in the process of reaching out to shake his awkwardly positioned hand, she had stood up and was no longer sitting in Dandy's chair._

**To be continued…**

Author Note: Sorry the delay and sorry that this ran a little long, but I hope you enjoyed it all the same. R&R!

Also, special thanks to snake screamer, who acted as a beta reader for this chapter. Yes, I have a member of the sneeple as a beta reader, what of it?


	3. Ray Gun Summer

**Chapter 3: Ray Gun Summer**

"_Mrs. Daver, I'm sorry for your loss. I really am." Pearl said, though she wasn't sure how true her words were. After all, they had known each other for less than an hour. This made her attempts at pity and how close the recent widow was holding her to her chest seem overly familiar to say the least._

"_Calvin! Oh my metaphorically poor and poetically sweet Calvin!" Mrs. Daver moaned, clutching the Crystal Gem even harder._

_Pearl managed to twist her head just in time so that only her right cheek was pressed against the much larger alien woman's abdominal area. Had she been a little slower, she might've wound up with a face full of sweaty undulating velvet. "Y-yes, what happened to Mr. Daver was highly unfortunate. I know-woo-getting a little close here-." Pearl said sideways before stopping herself. The lady very much in front of her was clearly in great emotional distress, so it was understandable that she'd want to vent some of that grief. She'd just have to bear with this unsolicited embracing for a little while longer "I mean-I know what it's like to lose people you care about, espe-he-he-hey-! Especially when it seems to happen so suddenly."_

"_Seems?! So do you think it's true?!" Mrs. Daver asked above her. "Do you also think that it might've been-that it might've been-."_

_Though she couldn't see the woman's face, the shuddering of the fabric beneath Pearl's cheeks told her that a fresh fit of sobbing was all but imminent if she didn't try to cut her off. "I'm just saying that given Mr. Daver's…constitution, it could be said that this was a long time-."_

"_MURDER!" Mrs. Daver finished._

"_Murder?!"_

"_Yes, murder!"_

"_Murder," Incidentally, Pearl's confusion at this statement served as a merciful distraction from how her head was being pelted by the tears coming down from Mrs. Daver's six eyes. "Who said this was murder?"_

"_Your companion," Mrs. Daver sniffed. "The one with the tacky coiffure."_

_The word 'companion' failed to register, but the mention of 'tacky' did. "Is that so?" _

_After letting the tentacle-headed mistress of the house cry on her for a few more minutes, Pearl escorted her back to her quarters for some much need rest. Once she was sure Mrs. Daver was sound asleep, Pearl gingerly slipped out of her scaly four-armed hold and made her way downstairs to the receiving room. There, she found Dandy squatting by the corpse, looking it over and occasionally making "hmmm" and "ahhhh" noises as he did so._

"_Why in the world did you tell Mrs. Daver that her husband was murdered?" Pearl asked, certain she wasn't interrupting anything important._

"_I didn't say that Calvin here was murdered," Dandy claimed, his back still to Pearl. "I said that he MIGHT have been murdered."_

_Pearl slapped her Gem and tried to tell herself that there had been enough death for one day. Probably. "I leave you alone with her for five minutes to find a phone and the moment I come back she's all over me like lichen on boulders because you told her that Mr. Daver MIGHT have been the victim of foul play. Did I miss anything?!"_

"_Look, I'm as upset as you are with how that went," Dandy said, turning to look at her. "There I was, ready and open to be her shoulder to cry on and she chooses to latch on to you instead. I mean you didn't even hug back or nuzzle. Talk about your missed opportunities."_

_Pearl took a deep breath. She didn't need the air, but it made for an excellent coping mechanism for stress and frustration; one that had gotten a lot of mileage as of late. "Please tell me that was your sole motivation for telling her something so preposterous," she pleaded. Yes, it was an absurdly distasteful aim and towards one so emotionally vulnerable no less, but if that had been the case, they could call the authorities, answer a few trite questions, and leave before Mrs. Daver had the chance to grab her again. Perhaps Dandy was just scrutinizing the corpse out of some morbid curiosity or to mourn the wulongs he'd never get due to the untimely demise of his bounty. Of course, this still left one little abnormality unexplained. "Where did you get that monocle?"_

_To her horror, but not her surprise, Dandy pointed to the recently deceased in front of him. _

"_YOU LOOTED HIS CORPSE?!"_

"_Not all of it. I left the rest of his stuff alone." Dandy countered. "Besides, it's the least he can do. I'm going to use it to avenge his untimely death."_

_Pearl groaned. Over the course of their brief, but terribly eventful association, she had quickly learned that if there was one thing that rivaled Dandy's love of getting paid or getting 'lucky', it was his love of getting even. Thus 'avenge' was one of his most favorite verbs, especially when the person he was avenging was himself regardless of how legitimate or imagined the injury actually was. "There's no way that's going to happen."_

"_Sure it can." Dandy said, tapping the side of the monocle's frame. "It's actually pretty cool. This thing's got a zoom-in feature, infrared, microwave, nightvision, x-ray…whoah, easy, I was kidding about that last one," he clarified when he saw her cross one arm over her chest and raise the other to strike. "Needless to say, with this little doohickey on my eyeball, finding the killer will be a cinch."_

"_There is no killer," she insisted._

"_How would you know?"_

_To make sure that she gutted that question thoroughly, Pearl briefly reviewed the events of the last few hours. Following an anonymous tip, she, Dandy, and QT had come to this planet in search of a rare infamous alien that had dodged every attempt to capture it so far. Upon arriving, they had followed the trail to this address and discovered that their target was one Calvin Daver. Mr. Daver took finally being cornered at ray gunpoint very well and proved to be very graceful and polite in his defeat. He invited them inside, requesting that he be allowed to talk to his wife and partake in one last meal before his "legend ended"; of course his captors would be more than welcome to join him. _

_Predictably, Dandy agreed to his proposal. Pearl herself politely declined the offered food and drink – if they were poisoned, that was Dandy's problem – and waited patiently for the lunch to end so they could get going. At last, having taken his final glass of brandy as an unregistered alien, Mr. Davers waddled over to the room's mahogany coat rack, grabbed his bowler hat off one of the hooks, put it on his balding feathered cranium, gave them all a warm smile, and then promptly dropped dead on the spot. That had been alarming and would have been just a little bit suspicious if not for the fact that Mr. Daver had been eluding alien hunters for several decades. "Dandy, Calvin Daver was nearly a hundred!"_

_Dandy snorted, forming a poignant and unintentional contrast to his high-class eyewear. "Says the magic lady that's several thousand years older than that."_

"_W-Well I certainly don't look it." Pearl said with a turn of her nose and an unconscious jut of her hip._

"_So what? This isn't about you. This is about Calvin. He might actually look his age and yeah, he's starting to smell a bit burnt, but he deserves to have his murder solved as much as the next posh, extraterrestrial, albatross guy!"_

"_IT-WAS-NOT-MURDER!"_

"_Punctuating those words doesn't make them true. And shame on you for leaving Mrs. Daver all alone. Who knows? She might be next."_

_Pearl thought back to the seven-foot, well endowed, many-eyed, multi-armed gorgon mistress of the estate whose iron hold she was only able to free herself from after she had fallen unconscious. "I'm pretty sure she can take care of herself."_

"_How can you be sure about that? About anything?" Dandy asked. "The universe is full of secrets and facades; cons and false fronts; ill-fitting ambiguities for every occasion. The only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty. And my Space Inspector instincts are telling me that the only thing that can pierce through this smorgasbord of deception and lies-." He stood and turned, pointing a finger in Pearl's direction, his stolen monocle fiercely glinting in the light as he spun. "-Is a Dandy Eye!"_

_Pearl was almost impressed at how coherent and nigh-thoughtful that had been until the end. "Space Inspector Instincts?"_

"_Yup, from my time as in intergalactic detective."_

"_Last week you were supposedly a ninja." Pearl reminded, letting her tone all but state that he had been a rather terrible one at that._

"_I can be both."_

_Pearl was about to say that he could also be neither, when she heard a faint creaking to her left. When she and Dandy looked to where it had come from, they saw QT, part of him obscured by the door he was hiding behind. "Oh, um, Hi Pearl. Hi Dandy," he greeted._

"_Finally, someone sensible I can talk to," Pearl exclaimed. "QT, would you please come in here and help me convince Dandy that he's being even more ridiculous than usual?"_

"_O-okay." QT wheeled himself into the room. When he fully exposed himself to his crewmates, Pearl immediately regretted asking him to enter._

"_QT, why are you holding a knife?" Pearl asked as both she and Dandy began to back away from him. Her fists clenched and one of his hands began to drift to where he kept his blaster. Neither were strangers to killer androids or crazed synthetic beings, and the little robot's reach often belied his diminutive stature. _

"_I-it wasn't me!" QT squealed, waving his hands – and the knife – in front of him. "They were like that when I found them!"_

"_They?" Pearl asked, oblivious to the widening grin on Dandy's face._

_QT tilted his body forward twice to nod. "While you were getting glomped by Mrs. Daver, Dandy sent me to snoop around for anything suspicious. I thought he was being silly, so I just looked for a phone since the two of you were busy getting hugged and looking at dead bodies," he whimpered. "And when I finally found one, I tried to call the police, but I couldn't get a signal because the PHONE LINES HAD BEEN CUT!"_

"_HAH!" Dandy barked. "That right there is a classic sign of a murder mystery in action!"_

"_That doesn't prove a thing!" Pearl shot back. It just couldn't be a factor in an era where much more advanced forms of telecommunication were available. "A small rodent could've gnawed through it before we got here."_

_There was a loud autotuned gulp. "A-all of the other phones had their lines cut too." QT waited for Pearl to counter this piece of information, but she was silent, clearly just as confused as he was. "That's why I stopped by the kitchen on my way here. C-can't be too careful, right?"_

_Pearl sometimes forgot how emotional QT could get. It was fascinating really; she hadn't known many machines that could mimic feelings to such a degree. "QT, we're going to need you to calm down. You can put the knife away. There's nothing to be afraid of."_

"_Except there probably is." Dandy insisted, causing QT to whimper and regard every door, window, and shadowy crevice with frantic suspicion._

_Wonderful, Pearl thought. Now there was a paranoid robot rolling around the room with a knife. "Why do you want this to be a case of man…bird…manslaughter so badly?" she asked._

"_Two reasons," One of Dandy's fingers popped up. "First, the pursuit of truth and justice," a second finger rose. "Next, there might be a substantial reward for the killer's capture."_

"_What if there isn't a reward?"_

"_Then we can keep the murderer in the brig for a few months until one comes around. Give him a little taste of incarceration to prepare him for the celestial Sing-Sing." _

"_Well isn't that generous of us." Pearl grumbled. "Too bad that there isn't an actual criminal to do that to." _

_Dandy made a pronounced noise of disappointment. "I know we just met, Pearl. But trust me on this. My mind is like a bear trap basted in baby oil, slipping through the cramped labyrinthine crevices of confusion, and never letting go of the truth once it gets its big, pointy, greased up teeth around its ankle." _

"_That sounds both painful and disgusting," Pearl said. Though she had to admit, maybe that made it an apt description of Dandy's headspace after all, sans the finding truth part._

"_Hate on the allegory all you want, but the point still stands. With enough information and time, no mystery's beyond my ability to solve. Why, with just the few clues available to me right now, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that this was murder. Plain and simple."_

"_Really?" Pearl was about to argue that just about anyone could make the same claim, but thought of an even better way to disembowel Dandy's latest delusion of brilliance. "So if I gave you enough data, you could figure out the solution to any problem, correct?_

"_You got that right. There's no question I can't answer." Dandy said. "See? I just did. Just like that. Easy. So if one ever stumps you, feel free to come to me."_

"_Okay," Pearl lightly bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from smirking. "What's the square root of 36,168,196 minus 8?"_

_The question had come rather fast, but Dandy thought he got the gist of it. He took the straightforward shreds of information he'd been given and ran them through the electric tunnels of his mind. Synapses buzzed and trembled as they rolled the numbers among them, punting them back and forth to shear off babel and excess. This roughly rounded form of the question was then dunked into the greater reservoirs of his intellect for further distilment and stirred lightly with a silver spoon. He waited a few moments before lifting it out of a vast pool of profane ultra dense cosmic knowledge, a heavy and boiling ocean of information. There, free of impurities and now heavily churned, shining like a disco ball star was the answer. Kind of. Truth be told, that's just how Dandy envisioned the process going. It was really tiring, but with all that mental strain and lack of distraction, what he came up with during his elaborate fantasy must've been right to some degree. And so it was, with a complete lack of shame and a triumphant glimmer in his eye, did he point to Pearl and answered,_

"_The Square Root of 36,168,196 minus 8, of course."_

* * *

><p>"I tried to explain, 'No, I mean, what is the square root of 36,168,196 minus 8." Then he said, 'I already told you, it's the square root of 36,168,196 minus 8.' I tried again, he just said the same thing. I said I wanted the answer, he said that was the answer. I told him I wanted it solved and he said that's what he did. Then when I told him what it actually was, he goes all indignant on me and says, 'If you knew what the answer was, then why did you bother asking? Stop wasting time, we've got a mystery to solve, baby!' Simply unbelievable, wouldn't you agree?" Pearl exclaimed.<p>

Amethyst grunted noncommittally in response. It was unbelievable, deranged, mad even, but having known her for so long, she really shouldn't have underestimated Pearl's ability to suck the fun out of pretty much anything. It had started out innocently enough, well, okay, that wasn't entirely right, but the intent wasn't explicitly malicious. They had been sailing for a few minutes and things had been quiet. Annoying quiet, Amethyst had thought, but oh how she would do anything to get that back.

Pearl had persisted in gazing at the Aloha-Oe for telltale signs of Dandy trying to escape until Beach City was little more than a blurry outline on the horizon. With nothing left to fixate on and the Slammerhead an indeterminate distance away, she was at a loss. She tried to keep a strong face, perhaps to make up for how hasty and panicked she had been for most of the day, but there was no hiding how fidgety and stressed she felt. Out of boredom, curiosity, and a desire for fresh blackmail material, Amethyst had asked in the gentlest and most concerned tone she could muster, if Pearl wanted to talk about her time with Dandy.

Ideally, Pearl would have tiptoed around the question, Amethyst would have lightly pressed the issue, and Garnet would have assured her that she was among friends and shouldn't feel the need to hide anything. In her drained and inattentive state, Pearl would let her guard down and then accidentally give away some embarrassing and compromising anecdotes from her short stint as an alien hunter. Amethyst had expected a trickle of information that would gradually grow as time wore on. She had also expected absolute refusal; easy come, easy go. What she hadn't expected was the flood.

It Came From PLANET MOUTH! That's what she was going to call the movie. Oh you bet there was going to be a movie. Even if she had to write, direct, produce, star in, film, and distribute it all by herself; there was going to be a movie. If so much as a single person saw it, she'd consider it a success, because Amethyst would know that there was at least someone out there who knew; someone out there who understood the catastrophic monotony that was being trapped on a boat with Pearl and having to listen to her drone on and on and on. Maybe she could trick Connie into screening it.

"I don't think there's much to tell, really." Pearl had said. Famous last words, or to be more accurate, infamous first words. They were just the prelude, the wind-up, the waves pulling away from the shore en masse. "Although, now that you mention it, there was this one time…" was what she said next. That was all the warning Amethyst ever got, because after that one time was another time and another time and another. Before she knew it, she was all ready under, submerged in a torrent of noxious reminiscing.

Conceptually, it shouldn't have been as bad as it was. Pearl loved space to the point of obsession and from what Amethyst had gleaned from the barrage of self-absorbed yarns, she and Dandy had travelled several parsecs and visited dozens of worlds before they broke up. That was a lot of time and space to have something interesting happen to her, and Amethyst suspected that a lot had. However, that potential was completely wasted in the telling. There was a distinct lack of focus on where they went and what they did, and a heavier emphasis on Pearl expressing her feelings than anything else. Expressing her feelings being a very polite way to phrase that she was endlessly complaining about something Dandy said or did in her presence. Again, this had the makings of something passably entertaining, but that's where these stories had the tendency to stall. Trying to get Pearl to move on from these points and tell them how the overall misadventure had went resulted in the question reminding her of a totally different episode that she'd immediately jump into.

These tangents that left the stories largely incomplete were far from the only problems with Pearl's tales of Dandy woe. They had a tendency to jump all across the span of her time on the Aloha-Oe; sometimes prefaced with references, peppered with allusions, and capped off with hints to events that she hadn't and wouldn't elaborate on. It was 'As You Know" ad nauseum, skipping back and forth between the near-beginning and the near-finish with the only consistency being that she wouldn't tell them how it all started or ended. Amethyst wished she could ask QT about the details Pearl couldn't – or most likely wouldn't – give, but the lanky loudmouth had set herself squarely in the middle of the boat, keeping the Crystal Gems and the alien hunters seperated. If either side was to communicate with the other, they'd have to shout over Pearl, which Amethyst had tried to do a few times to get some information out of QT. The robot had tried to answer, but fierce condemning glares from Pearl silenced him whenever he did. Wasn't that just the way? If Pearl was making an effort keep the lid on her former crewmate, that all but proved that some truly juicy things had happened, but no, they'd be getting none of that if the lanky loudmouth could help it.

However, the biggest offense of all was how Amethyst was apparently the only one suffering under this oratory onslaught. Garnet was too busy trying to use her powers to find the Slammerhead, though she seemed to still be getting a bit of interference from Dandy even at this distance. With no further questions being thrown at him and with all of Pearl's attentions on her fellow Gems, QT had turned to double-checking and triple-checking his gear; Amethyst suspected that he had a means of switching off his robot ear things or whatever you called them. Meow was fiddling around with his phone, ostensibly to look up information on their target, but he had been smiling way too often for someone who was supposedly working. This left her as the sole member of Pearl's audience and she had no choice but to listen. What a dark day this was if Pearl's diatribes were the sounds most worthy of notice, but they were. The waves were dull and the wind was boring, and even if they weren't, Pearl's voice would overpower them regardless. Amethyst had settled for trying not to engage Pearl all that much. Being silent had somehow caused her to rant harder, so she came to the conclusion that a few choice and blasé mumbles could ease Pearl back into shutting up and looking dour until they got to the fighting. The pale Gem was all ready winding down from her exhaustive lecture on how to solve the problem she had posited to Dandy and so long as nothing outright provoked her, this could very well be the end of it.

"So was it murder or not?" Meow asked behind her, not looking up.

Amethyst was going to kill him. She would find his neck in that soft, inflated cucumber body of his and get her hands around it the first chance she got.

Shockingly, this didn't cause Pearl to start talking about something else entirely. "No," she admitted reluctantly. "Not exactly that."

"It sort of was though." QT said.

That got Amethyst's attention, and incidentally, might have saved QT and Meow's lives. "Care to explain?" she asked.

"Uh, well, that's, you could say-," she trailed off, speechless for the first time in what felt like ages to her shorter compatriot. "The burning smell Dandy mentioned."

Meow's eyes never left his phone as he asked, "The one coming off of the dead guy?"

"Yes. That one." Pearl folded her arms across her chest and looked to the side. If she had bothered to save any money, Amethyst would've bet that she was doing this to avoid looking at them than to take a gander at the sea. "It was really odd that he'd smell burnt. Rotten? Maybe. But it hadn't even been an hour, the inside of the house was nice and cool, and his bowels hadn't even-." She grimaced. "-moving on. After we, I mean Dandy, blundered around the house, we thought to reenact Mr. Daver's final moments."

"By having me stand in for him." QT added grumpily.

"You were about the same size."

"You could have shapeshifted."

Pearl meekly shrugged. "So we taped the monocle to his visor, went through the motions of the meal, and at the end we took – after a bit of arguing – the bowler hat from Mr. Daver's cold scalp and put it on QT's head. Then-."

"I got shot in the face." QT interrupted.

"Don't exaggerate, QT. It was just a highly concentrated beam of light fired from the lens."

"That got shot into my face." QT stated.

Amethyst moved a few of her bangs away from her eyes as she considered this. "Wait. Why did the monocle start shooting death rays all of a sudden?"

"It was just the one ray." Pearl said. "And it only went off after QT put the hat on."

"It nearly fried my circuits!" the robot exclaimed. "I'm only here today because it barely missed my CPU."

"Good thing that it did, right?" Pearl gave off a nervous chuckle. "Miss your CPU, I mean," she clarified.

"Okay," Amethyst chewed on this latest revelation. "So the hat causes the fancy eyewear to blast whoever's wearing them both."

Pearl nodded. "What happened to QT happened to Daver. The beam went directly through his eye and into his brain. It was intense and hot enough that it fatally seared through some very essential parts of his grey matter, but it was so quick and slight that none of us noticed it doing so."

Hearing about this new and violent dimension to Calvin Daver's passing brought a grin of morbid anticipation to Amethyst's lips. "Wow, that's terrible. Did you find out who set him up? Was it his wife? His best friend? His evil twin?"

"It was Calvin." Pearl answered stiffly.

"What." Amethyst and Meow asked.

"Yes, that was our reaction as well when we found out." Pearl said. "Once we made sure QT was still functioning, we confronted Mrs. Daver about the device and she gave us this outrageous story about how Calvin had some terminal disease and wanted to give a bunch of alien hunters the slip one last time before he died. She claimed that they were the ones who sent the anonymous tip that brought us to them so we'd come all the way there just for Mr. Daver to die and leave us confused and penniless."

"You didn't believe her did you?" Meow asked. "She could've just made that all up to get away with lasering her beau."

"No, we didn't. Why would we? We said that her story just made her even more suspicious and demanded proof. She told us that she didn't have much except for some receipts for the hat and monocle in her husband's name…and a handwritten diary whose final entries corroborated with what she said…and a video farewell to her made the previous day that asked that she not hate him too much for designing such an ego-driven end for himself."

She didn't sound like she was convinced by the listed evidence and neither was Meow. "Well she could've just forged those herself or had some accomplices fake them."

"If she had accomplices, then the local constabulary, the district attorney, and several judges were among them since they said that Calvin had warned them of what he was supposedly going to do a few weeks in advance."

Meow whistled. That would've been some racket. He turned to QT and asked, "What happened next?"

QT flicked the brim of his cap up to better look Meow in the eye. "We left. If she was telling the truth, she certainly had a lot of evidence and testimonials backing what she said. And if she wasn't, eh, it's not like we could've brought her to court what with all the lawyers and justices that supported her story. We didn't get any reward money, but Dandy considered solving the 'mystery' and getting a free meal as a win and called it a day. Never mind the hole in my head," he bobbed his body in Pearl's direction. "Thanks for fixing that by the way."

"Think nothing of it." Pearl replied, allowing herself a small smile at those words of gratitude.

"Hmmm. So either way, whether it was to troll you guys or get his money, someone blew Daver's mind. What do you know? Dandy was right all along," she casually pondered out loud in Pearl's direction.

"That's one way to look at it." Pearl said, voice neutral.

"I guess he's a lot smarter than you gave him credit for." Amethyst smirked.

"Smart? Hardly. Witty is what he is. Not intelligent enough to be trusted to do anything useful, but capable of enough thought to irritate."

Amethyst thought that she could appreciate a level of mental aptitude like that. Then she recognized that a familiar harsh energy had returned to Pearl's speech.

"Now that you mention it, there was this one time-."

Amethyst screamed internally. It was starting again. It had been on a decline and would've fizzled out, but she had screwed it up.

"-that Dandy finally got around to washing his filthy wardrobe. The odor was – ugh! – you don't want to imagine the odor."

It'd be preferable to this, Amethyst thought.

"Then it transpires that he didn't have any clothes that weren't covered in dirt and horrible fluids. Save for a pair of glittery….neon…hotpants."

To Amethyst's envy, QT and Meow were back to distracting themselves, uncaring or jaded towards the image of their captain walking around their ship in stretchy short-shorts.

"Naturally, after a few of his pants and shirts come out of the dryer, I ask him to put some clothes on. Then he says, 'Your wish is my command, baby,' puts on his jacket…and nothing else. For four straight days, that's all he wore. Thank goodness we eventually landed on that tundra moon."

The purple Gem was close, so close to snapping. At this rate, she wasn't going to survive another stupid story.

"That's what it all boiled down to. Don't let that lean physique fool you. Dandy's a slob and a slacker. A completely undependable louse."

Amethyst blinked. Was she being serious?

"Can you imagine having to live with such a slovenly deadbeat, Amethyst?"

Maybe she was being serious. Maybe Pearl really was just talking about Dandy. Amethyst felt insulted all the same. "Wow, hey guys, don't you think the wind's totally phoning it in today? I say we bring out the oars and show the ocean who's boss," she said, taking out one of the Gem Sloop's paddles. "Whadya say, Garnet?"

"I dunno." Garnet said. "I think we're going at a pretty swift pace."

"And when he isn't being a lazy bum, he's a pretentious poser." Pearl continued, ignoring Amethyst's suggestion. "Acting like he's all that, but guess what? He isn't. No matter how often he wears sunglasses indoors."

Pearl didn't notice that Garnet was now staring at her.

"We're going through an asteroid belt and this is an immense, truly IMMENSE, field of supermassive space rocks. Warp drive's broken – AGAIN! – QT's at a loss, I haven't navigated through something like it in a moon's age. We defer to Dandy – big mistake, I know – ask him what we should do. And he unfolds his arms for the first time in hours and gestures." Pearl snapped her fingers and pointed them at Amethyst and Garnet. "That's it. I thought he was intolerable as a loudmouth, but he was just as bad when he tried 'playing it cool' by barely saying anything at all."

"All right." Garnet had the mast and sail retract into the boat. She picked up the other oar. "Let's roll."

"Initiative. I like that. Very good, Garnet."

"Actually it was Amethyst's-."

"I can certainly tell you about someone who barely has any. Which reminds me of this one time-."

The sloop was launched into the air where it remained for a few dozen feet.

***SPLASH!***

When it landed, Amethyst and Garnet were all ready digging their paddles into the waves for another row. After their oars had found purchase, they pulled again, propelling them over the waves once more. Due to their days serving on a slipshod spacecraft having acclimated them to such turbulence, Meow and QT were silent.

"-that just ain't Dandy way, he said. What kind of lurid excuse is tha-?!"

The same couldn't be said for Pearl, whose droning discourse proceeded unhindered and could still be heard outside of one merciful moment.

***SPLASH!***

"-sometimes I think I can still smell the-."

***SPLASH!***

"-none of which would have happened if he hadn't elbowed that Yeti's-!"

***SPLASH!***

"-your fault for putting your tongue there!"

***SPLASH!***

* * *

><p>"So is that a 'no' on the multiplayer?"<p>

Steven once asked the Gems why they rarely locked the front door. After all, weren't they worried about being burgled? Pearl said this was because thieves wouldn't be able to access the innermost depths of the temple anyway due to how its defenses worked. Before she could finish saying such, Amethyst interrupted and claimed that the fearsome and bodaciously spectacular reputation of the Crystal Gems – and Pearl – was more than enough to keep bandits away via sheer intimidation. As the two bickered, Steven snuck away to get Garnet's perspective on the matter. When asked, she shrugged and said. "Thieves don't usually break into places where there's not much to steal." She didn't say any more, but Steven understood what she meant.

The Temple was huge and grand, but its protracted existence for several millennia had caused the people of the surrounding counties to grow largely ambivalent of it. As far as they or any burglar knew, there was nothing to see there; just a trio, formerly quartet, of strange angry hermit ladies that didn't like people very much. And the house, a fairly new addition to the structure, wouldn't have been a very appealing target either. Honestly, what was there to take? An old TV, some rundown furniture, a couple of well-worn game consoles, a few books, and a number of tacky knickknacks. Hardly the score of the century, and more easily procured from domiciles within the town itself where you didn't have an ocean in the way of your potential escape if things went pear-shaped.

The Crystal Gems didn't even really have any money, certainly not enough to constitute a substantial horde. Their disposable income that wasn't stuffed into piggy banks or stuck between the couch cushions came from several smart long-term investments Pearl and Rose had made over the years just in case they'd ever need human currency. These profits went into paying the bills and rarely made their way into any of their wallets.

True, there was a number of dangerous Gem artifacts and devices in their possession, but practically nobody knew about those. And even if they did, they were help deep within the recesses of the Temple. Ergo protected by what Pearl and Amethyst believed were the primary deterrents to stealing from them. So for the longest time, Steven felt perfectly safe in the open confines of the house.

Until today, because the man on the lower deck of his home wasn't there to try and break into the Temple or make off with the refrigerator. If Pearl had been telling the truth, Dandy was here for him specifically. With the Gems gone and him trapped indoors by the very barricades they set up to keep Dandy out, the distance to the warp pad seemed to double in Steven's eyes. "D-Dandy, hey. What's up?" Steven put down the controller. "How'd you do that?"

Much to his relief and confusion, Dandy was more fixated on looking around the darkened interior of the house than kidnapping him. "Ship's got a built-in teleporter," he explained, leafing through one of Steven's discarded comics. "Say, there a light switch around here? All this poor illuminations starting to get me down," When his host didn't answer right away, he turned to look in his direction to see that the boy was halfway down the steps leading up to his bed. "You hungry, Steven? You're rubbing your stomach a whole lot."

"Oh that's just because of-." Steven rubbed the fabric atop his Gem a little faster, a little harder. If he could activate his shield, he wouldn't need to get to the warp pad. He could hide out in his bubble until Gems came back. But it just wasn't coming. He was in danger wasn't he? Dandy hadn't attacked him yet, but he was capable of it. Though even if he did manage to get it up, how long would he need to wait for the others? What if they never returned? What if Dandy had a way to break through his barrier? What would stop him from teleporting into his bubble to nab him? Or maybe he'd just teleport them back to his ship. Was it even broken? Pearl said Dandy wasn't to be trusted, what if he was lying about it not being able to fly? "-it's just a little indigestion." His hand fell away and he tried to will his weapon into existence. No luck. "I am a little hungry though. Why don't you look in the fridge and see if there's anything there for us to munch on?"

Blinded by the promise of free grub, Dandy didn't see this for the diversion that it was and set the comic down on the table. "I am feeling a little peckish…" he said as he made for the kitchen. "Though maybe you should go easy on the snacks if you're stomach's giving you the runaround."

A sudden growl stopped him in his tracks.

Steven's own careful shuffling towards the warp pad came to a halt when he saw Lion awake and staring intently at Dandy. The animal's features were impassive, but the way he was posed on all fours, head low and hind legs coiled to spring, hinted at an imminent and very feral pounce. Steven bit his lip. Just because he didn't want Dandy to capture him, that didn't mean he wanted the guy to get eaten by Lion. Thankfully, that hadn't happened yet. Lion appeared to be sizing Dandy up, trying to determine if he was due for a thorough mauling. The alien hunter would be fine if he didn't make any sudden moves or do anything stupid. Like walking to where Lion was, the heavy footfalls of his metallic soles setting the feline further on edge. Or squatting in front of the big cat to look it in the eye, effectively putting a very big and growingly agitated animal in a corner.

"And a good day to you, your majesty." Dandy greeted in his horribly close and vulnerable position. "Didn't see you skulking over here. My fault." Lion continued to growl in spite of this apology.

"I don't think you should get that close to him, Dandy." Steven warned. He was so close to the warp pad now. A few more yards and he'd be able to escape to, well, a desolate and dull location of his choice. "You did try to shoot him earlier."

"That's practically ancient history, kid. You gotta learn to put that stuff behind you. He tried to kill me, I tried to kill him, he ended up attacking Meow and got half a pizza. Everybody won. Besides, if I was too far away, I couldn't give him this." he said as he reached into his jacket. Lion snarled at the gesture, tail whipping dangerously behind him. Carefully, Dandy pulled out a small stick topped with a thick plume of white fluff. "Check it out, big fella," he said, wagging the miniature feather duster in front of the much less angry Lion. "And that's not all." Dandy took both ends of the cat wand and snapped it in the middle. The sudden harsh sound caused Lion to flinch, but instead of breaking, the toy started to give off a brilliant golden glow. To Lion's further astonishment, the glimmer travelled all the way up to the wand's tuft of feathers. "Pretty neat, huh?" Dandy asked as the billowy bundle of bristling light arrested Lion's attentions. Steven was relieved to see his animal companion relax his stance and retract his claws.

Dandy set the glowing wand on the floor, but didn't let go. He slowly moved it left and right in wide delicate arcs. Lion's eyes followed the fluffy bulb of light, entranced by the miniature spectacle. The tip of the wand brushed against some of his toes and finding the sensation pleasant, Lion gently brought a paw down to catch it. However, the moment Lion's paw was about to connect with the wand, Dandy quickly flicked it, causing him to barely miss his target. Lion tried again, carefully watching the wand's position before he swiped at it, only for Dandy to move it away at the last second once more. He giggled at Lion's third failed attempt and began to erratically alter the speed of his sweeps. As he waited to thwart the cat's next effort, he didn't notice that Lion was no longer looking at the wand, but at him.

Lion studied Dandy's pleased expression. He looked down at Dandy's hand, the one waving the wand around, and squinted. Then he started to lift his paw, lifted it higher than he had during his past attempts. He pulled it back as far he could, leaning into it with his torso to bring it up even further. Then he brought it down and slapped Dandy hard on the face and across the room.

***CRASH***

"Hrrrk…" Miraculously, Dandy failed to hit any furniture as he was sent tumbling towards the other side of the house, though the sound of splintering wood indicated that he had caused significant damage to the wall he had crashed into. "Clever…cat…jerk…cat," he groaned.

Seeing the man he had been so afraid of moments before upside-down and dazed, Steven couldn't help but laugh, though he did his best to stifle it.

"That's just plain cruel, kid." Dandy reprimanded groggily, but what he said next was peppered with notes of dark cheer. "Though I'd probably do the same if this had happened to somebody else," he admitted as he started to awkwardly kick out with his upturned legs.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm trying to get back up," Dandy answered, attempting another kick. "It's no good. I think I might be stuck."

"Do you need any help?"

"Nah. I've gotten myself out of tighter spots than this." Dandy winked. He braced his feet and hands against the wall and pushed, pulling himself free of the wall, but leaving a small hole where his rear had been lodged. "Well," he said as he got up. "At least we finally got some sunshine in here. Seriously, you guys should really think about investing in a skylight."

Steven imagined having one of those in the house and he liked what he thought. "That idea doesn't sound half bad actually," he stole a glance at Lion, who had taken Dandy's glowing cat wand in his mouth and was now moving it back and forth with his lips like a luminescent makeshift metronome. "I could try getting that back for you, if you like."

"Eh, it's fine," Dandy assured him as he rubbed his slapped cheek. "It was one of Meow's anyway."

"Oh."

While he clearly didn't see anything wrong with taking one of his crewmate's possessions without asking, Dandy was quick to recognize Steven's light dismay at him doing so. "Don't make such a big deal out of it, Steven. He's got like a thousand of them stashed around the ship. Besides, I don't think he'll want it back now that it's covered in lion spit."

"I guess that kinda makes it okay." Steven said as Lion continued to play with the toy unabated. At least he seemed to be having fun. "Soooooo…um, what brings you here to…the…Crystal Temple? Sh-shouldn't you be with Pearl and the…uh…others right now?" he asked stiffly, mentally reminding himself that he was just a few feet away from the warp pad if the answer was, 'TO CAPTURE YOU!'

The response was nothing so succinct. "Well you see, an hour or so ago I got locked in my ship. Couldn't use any of the exits. At first, I didn't really mind, less work for me after all. I watched a little TV, but it wasn't long before I got bored. I thought I'd maybe fire up the old teleporter and beam my way into town for a bit, but then I realized that I didn't know the locale very well. I gave it a little thought and quickly deduced who'd make for the perfect guide," he said, pointing to Steven.

"Guide?" Steven had to admit, that sounded a lot better than prey or meal ticket, but it was a lot more confusing. "Why me?"

"Steven, no offense to your Beach City, but little coastal burgs like these are notorious tourist traps, carefully designed to suck a wallet dry until there's nothing left. To get the most out of my time here I need someone I know, someone I can trust. Someone…like you. 'Steven Universe,' I thought to myself. 'There's a Gem with a heart of gold. He must know his way around here. He won't steer you wrong.' So how about it? I'll make it worth the trouble." Dandy offered.

Steven tried not to feel too bad at Dandy's accusations of honesty. Not telling him the reason he had gotten trapped in the Aloha-Oe wasn't actually a lie, was it? "If you need someone you know, why don't you try asking Pearl to show you around when she gets back?"

Dandy shifted his feet, his boots making the subtle motion ring loud and obvious through the house as they scraped across the wooden floor. "Yeah…as nice as she was last time I saw here, I'm pretty sure she still hates my guts."

"Don't take that too personally. She hates intestines in general."

"Ain't that the truth?" Dandy snickered at remembering that particular hang up of Pearl's. "Though she's probably not a big fan of the rest of me either."

"Why though?"

Dandy's slouched frame perked up at the question. "She still hasn't told you?" Steven shook his head. "Figures…you do want to know, don't you?"

"I guess that'd be neat." Steven tried to say casually, remembering that earnestness hadn't worked so well in getting answers from Pearl.

"Not really feeling the enthusiasm from you, but I think it'd still be healthy if I got some of this off my chest," Steven would've been jumping up and down if doing so wouldn't break his bluff. At last, some answers! "To my trusted tour guide."

"Oh come on!" Steven demanded, breaking character.

"Heh, so you do care." Dandy noted. "I'll tell you what, you show me around town for an hour or two and I'll tell you all about my previous adventures. Some of them even involve Pearl."

"This is extortion!" Steven accused with a little too much seriousness.

"It's business, kid." Dandy said. "If you really don't want to know, that's no skin off my back."

"Yeah? Well…well why don't I just ask Pearl about them later?" he challenged.

"You really think she will if you do? She's managed just fine without telling either you or her Gem pals for eight years." Dandy reminded, not even looking at Steven as he closed his eyes and rested the top of his index finger to his forehead. "And given how touchy she is about the subject, you just know that the few morsels of info she'll let you have will be biased, incomplete, or worse, untrue. Whereas I'd be more than happy to talk the talk."

"Hmmm…" Steven gave this some thought. If he turned away Dandy now, would that mean that he'd have to wait another eight years to get some answers from Pearl? Or would she simply feel no need to give any once Dandy had left? He didn't think he could deal with not knowing for another day, much less another near-decade. So after a bout of pensive pacing back and forth, Steven said. "Okay! Consider yourself the recipient of the first ever Steven Universe Super Tour! Beach City Edition."

"Awesome!" Dandy cheered. "Let's start by you finding us a way out of this creepily fortified house."

"Why don't you just teleport us out of here?"

"I don't want to stress the Aloha-Oe's energy reserves any more than I gotta. 'Sides," he sniffed. "The teleporter's got a couple of kinks we haven't quite hammered out yet."

"What kind of kinks?"

"The kind that pops you 50 stories up from where you wanted to go or gets you stuck in a wall."

"Yeesh." Steven grimaced. "A regular break-out it is then."

"We could try widening the crack I made with my butt." Dandy suggested. "Got any spare crowbars or battering rams lying arou-!"

***CRACK!***

Both Steven and Dandy jumped at the sound and they turned to its source just in time to see a pink leg and tail slink out of a formerly boarded up window.

"Your lion pal's got the right idea!" Dandy made his way to the freshly made opening. "Hang on a sec, Steven." He said as he started to use the metal soles of his boots to sweep away the shards of glass from the sides and bottom of the ruined frame. "I'll head out first, clear out a path. Shards of glass getting under your toes and between your feet and slippers can hurt like hell."

As Dandy swung himself over to the other side, Steven took a look at the Warp Pad. A few steps to the right, and he'd be on it. He could flee with Dandy being none the wiser. He'd be safe, if ignorant. It's what Pearl would've wanted.

"Yo Steven! Way's all clear. You coming?"

Pearl would probably be cross with him if he did, but from a certain point of view, it was technically her fault that Dandy even had the chance to offer him the opportunity. She had failed to keep him witlessly contained, and she wouldn't want him causing havoc in Beach City if it could be helped. He was practically doing her a favor when he approached the alien hunter and said. "Right behind you, Dandy!"

"Great," Dandy said as he helped Steven climb out the window. "So about that meal. Any good grub in this town?"

"Well…"

* * *

><p>"Buildings."<p>

"Families."

"Buildings!"

"Families!"

"BUILDINGS!"

"FAMILIES!"

"What are you two even doing?" Pearl asked. Ever since Garnet's restored powers had led them to this spot on the ocean, QT and Meow had been yelling these words to each other nonstop.

QT was the first to answer. "All the data collected on Slammerheads so far strongly suggest that they attack towns so much because they've got a taste for ravaging and looting them specifically. Ergo, buildings would make for the perfect bait."

"Ergo?" Meow spat. "Do you know how pretentious you sound right now? Besides, that data's got holes in it bigger than the craters these creeps leave behind. I've got it on good authority that Slammerheads have a huge crave-on for breaking up families so that the resulting widows, widowers, and orphans try to hunt them down. Then they kill them too. For sport."

"That's dumb."

"No dumber than yours."

"What rumor mill did you scrape this info out of?"

"Several ask blogs of people who suffered the loss of a loved one to a Slammerhead attack. All of which stopped updating when they each said they were going to go after the beasts that destroyed their families."

"They might have just been RP-ing."

"None of the disclaimers said so!"

Pearl grit her teeth. "Irregardless of how dumb either of your ideas for bait are, what does they have to do with those snow globes you've been shoving into one another's faces?" she asked,

The two alien hunters raised their trinkets to give Pearl a better look at them. Meow's globe had small plastic family playing in the city plaza while QT's had a miniature model of Beach City amidst a whirl of hokey white flakes. "We got them at a gift shop while we waited for you guys to get back." QT explained.

"That doesn't really answer my question."

"I thought Dandy would've told you while we were busy lifting the Aloha-Oe." Meow said.

"You mean while WE were lifting it." Amethyst corrected, making sure Meow saw her grip her oar menacingly.

"We kinda loosened it."

"Barely." Garnet said as she put her own paddle away.

"Whatever," the Betelgeusian grumbled. "Anyway, Slammerheads have a weird sense of depth perception. Because it doesn't take them much time to go from being really far away from their target as they position themselves in orbit to actually colliding with what they want to squash, they don't really understand the concept of distance," he pulled back the paw holding his snow globe family. "So they've got a tendency to think that something's far away," Meow suddenly thrust the globe as close to Pearl's face as he could manage from where he sat. "When it's actually just tiny."

The Gem remained skeptical. "And you'll just reel it in on the off chance it goes after your souvenirs."

"I don't see why not." QT said, fiddling with his rod. "They're Leviathan-class poles made with nano-diamondglass fabrication techniques. And we've almost kinda practically caught bigger lunkers than most see or nab in their lifetimes."

"But you didn't actually catch any of those." Pearl pointed out.

"Details, details," Meow said. "Our last near success was literally a once in a blue moon kind of deal. Compared to that, bringing in this wall-eyed dimwit will be a cinch," a clawed thumb popped out of his fuzzy paw and gestured to the sea behind him. "I mean it's just somewhere down there, right?"

"Yup. At the bottom." Garnet said, strapping a pair of goggles over her eyes and around her hair. "The very bottom."

Meow took a second, more careful look over the edge of the sloop, and saw that the water's clearness only went so far. A great dimness pervaded the rest. "I can't even see the regular bottom," he noted, suddenly thankful for all the extra line QT had insisted they bring along

"That's why I hope you don't mind us leaving the two of you on the boat." Pearl said. "Neither of you would be able to reach the Slammerhead, let alone see it in all this murk."

"That's okay." QT said. "I might be made of metal, but I'm actually pretty buoyant."

"And I hate water." Meow stated.

Amethyst wasn't about to give the space cat's latest hypocrisy a pass. "Then why didn't you just stay at the beach instead of bumming a ride to a place covered with the stuff?"

"Same reason Dandy was gonna," Meow began. "If the Slammerhead manages to recover and get away from us, I'd rather be as far away from Beach City as possible, if you catch my drift."

Pearl didn't want to admit how depressingly prudent this cowardly move was. So she didn't. "How gallant of you."

"Cut me some slack. I'm a survivor, not a fighter. Certainly not a swimmer," And even if he was one, Meow didn't say. He wouldn't chance a wet stroll through the merciless primordial melting pots of any world. "That said, how are you guys gonna get down there? I know you don't need to breathe, but it'll take forever to swim it."

Amethyst leapt off the side of the boat and into the water with a shout, free at last. "Wooo!" When she emerged, she smiled at Meow amidst a dusky fibrous pool of her own hair. "Maybe for a Gem," her form became concealed by a robust purple glow. When it vanished, there was a violet smarmy dolphin in her place. "But not for a fish! Akakakaka!"

"Dolphins are mammals." QT said.

Pearl sighed as Amethyst guiltlessly flipped and leapt amongst the waves, heedless of this simple fact. "Well that's more or less the idea. Amethyst and I will go down there in the forms of swift aquatic wildlife to find our mark."

"What about Garnet?" QT asked, seeing that the crimson Gem had stood up, arms to her sides, her gaze forward and fixed. Then she took a small deliberate hop out of the sloop and sank like an anvil.

"Oh."

* * *

><p>"Damn it." Dandy swore. Steven winced as the man tugged at the light gun's cable to try and find a better angle to fire.<p>

Showing Dandy around town had proven to be a little trickier than Steven had anticipated. The biggest difficulty of course, was that he had to stop Dandy from coming within detailed seeing range of the Aloha-Oe, lest he spot what the Gems had done to it. Dandy had parked it a considerable distance from and between the Crystal Temple and the boardwalk, effectively barring a large swath of the Beach from use. Steven had to convince him to take a more scenic route, which was made even longer by his having to avoid his father's carwash. He wasn't about to let him find out he was half-Gem now that he knew he was ignorant of that fact.

Restricting as all this was, there were still a number of landmarks and shops available to them; a good thing to, since as laidback as he tried to look, Dandy was a rather restless individual. Thankfully, Beach Citywalk Fries was one such establishment. Mr. Fryman and Peedee were as courteous as always and took Dandy's presence and fanciful introduction in stride. Coupled with a generous helping of fry bits, it looked like the first stop of the Steven Universe Super Tour was going to be a complete success.

Then Ronaldo showed up. Shoving his father and kid brother side, he reached over the counter and yanked Dandy towards him by the shirt. Steven could still hear him now, _"I remember you! You're the little yellow robot's ornamental meat slave from the beach!"_ he had exclaimed with desperate elation. _"What's its endgame?! Who is it working for?! Where are the rest of his fellow infernal machines hiding?! If you've got a mind vice stopping you from answering or an injected nanobomb that will explode if you say certain things, BLINK ME THE INFORMATION IN MORSE! OR BINARY! EITHER'S FINE!"_

An initially shocked and then gradually irked Dandy didn't answer or blink. Instead he flicked Ronaldo's glasses off his nose and into the deep fryer, grabbed the bags of bits, and ran off while yelling, _"Blink on that, weirdo!"_ Unable to think of anything else to do, Steven followed suit minus the jeer, dreading how much of a nightmare this was going to be on his credit.

They pointlessly continued running down the boardwalk for a few more minutes until Steven had them double back and duck into the Funland Arcade. _"We can hang around here until the heat dies down,"_ he had said. _"And have a little fun while we wait."_

Dandy was all too eager to partake in what the arcade had to offer and even used several of his recently earned fivers to get them some quarters. He proceeded to acquit himself admirably in every cabinet and game he tried, much to Steven's astonishment.

The young Gem marveled at the first 200-hit Teens of Rage combo he had ever seen.

"_Holy cow! N. Jinson was a cyborg the whole time!"_

"_Yowch! Dude's head popped off like a zit on homecoming!"_

He joyously cringed at the unprecedented path of destruction Dandy carved out in Road Killer.

"_Awesome! Monster Truck Power-Up!"_

"_They're gonna need eight lanes to contain THIS!"_

And he was wowed by his dancing prowess being more than a match for Rhythm Psycho's toughest levels.

"_I can't believe it! You're the new Hitchcock of the Walk!"_

"_Dial 'D' for Dandy, baby!"_

He didn't even mind that Dandy was earning more tickets since the guy just gave him all his winnings anyway. And as reams of papery triumph flowed from the redemption games like root beer from a broken soda fountain, Steven was of the mind that Phase Two of the tour was coming along nicely. Then they hit a snag at Dead Manors: Condoverkill. Like the cannibalistic domiciles that littered the game, this arcade shooter was eating up their tokens with rabid fervor. Or rather, they were feeding it quarters every other minute because Dandy seemed incapable of actually hitting anything.

It wasn't like Dandy wasn't trying, if anything, he was trying too hard. He kept tilting the plastic pistol at odd angles, jerked his arms in all manner of directions, pulled back from the screen, then went as close to the screen as he could; all in service of getting a better shot. He was currently using the game's two controllers to dual wield against the game's second boss, a sluggish bloodsucking barn whose broadside weakpoint managed to avoid getting hit despite its large bloated size and Dandy's additional weapon. When it was close enough so that it was completely filling their view, Count Barncula opened its fanged doors wide before slamming them shut, sending a purple splotch across the screen, and robbing Dandy of both of his final lives.

"Looks like you bought the FARM, Agent of D.E.D." the game mocked. "Continue?"

Dandy roared and rapidly fired his twin pistols at the screen, causing the descending numerals to crash down to zero.

**GAME OVER**

**The Department of Exotic Demolitions has fallen to the forces of Unreal Estate…**

"Awww…" Steven moaned. "That was the last of our tokens."

"I didn't see you helping."

"You took my controller."

"Oh right. My bad." Dandy returned the two light guns to the cabinet's holsters with a hard shove. "Eh, game was totally unrealistic anyway. Everything was on rails. I couldn't even take cover. Now if I was allowed to do any of my finely honed advanced firefight techniques, things would have ended very differently."

"Advanced firefight techniques?' Steven gasped. "Could you show me some?"

"Get me a few bottles and cans and I'll do more than show you."

Steven was more than happy to comply and after riffling through some vacated tables and burgeoning trashcans, they had several pungent and somewhat sticky bottles at their disposal. They took these motley containers out to the beach where they placed them atop a busted pet crate that Dandy had found discarded on a nearby curb. With their improvised firing range all set up, Dandy led them a little over a dozen yards away. Then he turned around, feet and arms set apart, his fingers twitched hungrily for something to grab. Steven held his breath.

Suddenly, Dandy dove forward, rolling across the sand and into a kneeling position, his ray gun at the ready.

"Armadillo!"

He whipped out his blaster, pulling its trigger in the middle of the swing.

"Vaunted!"

He fanned the firearm's nonexistent hammer no less than seven times.

"Stardust Six Shooter!"

He tossed the weapon into the air and bounced it back into his hand with his foot.

"Ow-ow-ow-ow! Erm-Hacky Zap! Nailed it."

He leapt sideways and aimed midair.

"Doctor Dove!"

And no true display of gunshowmanship would be complete without:

"Gangsta Style!"

Steven applauded. "That was great!" he said. "But why didn't you actually fire your ray gun?

"Just saving all the ammo for you, big guy." Dandy explained as he lobbed the blaster to Steven.

"Whuh?" Steven asked, barely catching it. "Me?"

"Sure. You were mowing down emo architecture like a fiend back in the arcade."

"That was with video game lasers."

"And now you get to fire one for real. Lucky you." Dandy boasted.

Steven thought to tell Dandy that had actually fired a laser before, but feared that this wouldn't discourage him in the slightest. Then again, why not give it a try? Live out every cowboy, mobster, space marine fantasy he'd ever had with a couple of free shots? He was curious as to what firing beams would be like outside of virtual reality and it couldn't have be all too different from using his mom's cannon. Granted, it was a lot smaller, lighter, and more fragile, but the underlying principle ought've been the same. "All right. So what's basic way to fire this?"

"Basic? You don't need basic. Just skip right to the good stuff I showed you."

"Shouldn't I work my way up to that first? Start with a more…normal firing stance?"

Dandy chuckled and shook his head. 'Steven, the thing about that boring old firing stance is that when you use it, people expect you to always hit your target because of how much accuracy it allegedly gives you. So no one's very impressed when you succeed and if you miss, you look and feel like an idiot because you had everything going for you. Take a chance to do something a little riskier and more awesome, and then everyone will think you won't actually hit your mark, but if you do, it'll be absolutely amazing. It's simple math, kid. And if you've seen Pearl fight at least once, then you really can't rag on me for my love of dramatics."

Steven couldn't deny that Pearl and the other Gems did seem to enjoy posing a whole lot and he thought that Dandy's reasoning was kind of deep and sensible in a really bizarre and roundabout way. But he also thought of how painful blowing his foot off would be if he did the Hacky Zap wrong. 'I'd still like to start with the basics please."

"Have it your way; feet apart, hands on the blaster, shooting arm straight, not shooting arm not so straight, knees bent. Bang Bang." He quickly acted out each step with palpable disinterest.

Steven mimicked his movements and asked, "Am I doing it right?"

"Possibly, maybe, I wouldn't really know. I don't use it that much." Dandy said apathetically. "Ah, almost forgot," he snatched the ray gun out of Steven's hands, popped open a compartment on its stock and slid two metal cylinders into it before snapping the lid shut. "Fresh batteries." He gave the fully charged firearm back to the kid and switched his attentions to the faraway targets. "Fire when ready, Mr. Universe!"

Steven settled back into position. He now felt calm and confident enough to attempt the shot. He closed an eye and pointed the blaster to a jumbo mouthwash bottle at the center of the lineup. As he was about to fire, Steven recalled that Dandy hadn't actually taught him how to aim with this thing and there was a question he had seen in a lot of action movies that he had forgotten to ask.

"How do I turn the safety off?"

"What's a safety?"

***ZAP!***

It is a really bad idea to give an underage youth something like a loaded ray gun. Note that "Like" and "Loaded" are meant to be the two key words in that sentence. Perhaps some might think that "You shouldn't give weapons to underage youths at all" would be the finer statement, but through strange coincidence or the depraved orchestrations of some demented entity, objects of great power did have a habit of coming into the possession of those barely old enough to drink. Maybe they were rooting through the family attic or exploring a derelict location surrounded in local superstition. The long and short of it is, child finds thing, thing turns out to be a receptacle of might, and then child has to struggle with what to do with it while dealing with their own personal hang-ups.

Enchanted swords, cursed talismans, ancient books, eldritch trading cards, magic wands, and giant robots are among the sort that will forever change that young man or woman's life and most likely get them hunted by interested parties. Many of these items have infinitely more destructive power than a simple over-the-counter ray gun, but they are still not as dangerous due to several informal ingrained safeguards. For one, they're hard to come by. Even if you took out the whole "chosen one" factor, not every gangly teen or molting prepubescent is going to have access to Frisbees that can shatter moons. Next, even if there was an endemic of violent godlike pets and railgun robot pals that people would set against one another, collateral damage be damned, there is still a small, but palpable delay between giving the command and having it obeyed. This leads to the final and most significant of these protections, conscious action. Casting a spell, firing up the 8th hyper state of your atom slicer, or even pressing a button to unleash your personal colossi's ultimate attack takes a modest measure of concentration and thought. While none of these completely eliminate the object's hazards, they made it so that you'd actually have to try to kill yourself with them.

Contrast those qualities to how ray guns can be purchased fairly easily. You could get one from a vending machine if you were in a rush. Then there are the many thousands of years of research and painful trial and error poured into the pursuit of accurate and expedient eradication, aka closing the gap between pointing at something and making it dead. While the resulting discharges had gotten faster and more deadly, the simple trigger persisted as the most practical method of bridging that gap. Pulling the trigger is easy and there lies the real issue. A finger twitch in the hierarchy of thought out motions is but a miniscule tier above a muscle spasm; a lobbed off arm can do one if you run enough electricity through it. Alien Hunters also made it a point to make the firing mechanism as sensitive as possible in case they needed to make a quick shot. Dandy putting in fresh batteries removed the last of the firearm's all ready meager failsafes.

So despite what the man said, Steven had every right to be nervous about hurting others or himself with the device. Though accidentally squeezing the trigger might not have been all that disastrous if he had been warned about the blaster's recoil. Of course, he hadn't, so when his bewilderment towards Dandy's ignorance of what a safety was caused him to involuntarily pull the trigger, the kickback nearly took him off his feet.

"AUGH!"

"Ow, missed it by a mile."

The shock he experienced from this made him squeeze the trigger again, releasing another brilliant blue beam of death.

"WHOAH!"

"It's cool, third time's the charm."

Adrenaline and a growing sense of panic made it impossible for him to think of anything else to do, let alone stop, leaving his body no choice but to fire again.

"EHHH!"

"That one came pretty close actually. Keep it up."

And again.

"AHHHH!"

"The bottles, not the crate, kid."

And again, with Steven feeling his grip loosening with each shot, barely clinging onto the pistol by his finger. So when it finally did slip out of his hands, he wasn't surprised so much as utterly horrified. Had the ray gun landed in cushiony sand, those fears would've been frivolous. Instead, the back of the weapon fell on the surface of a very hard seashell, putting sudden unwelcome stress on the gun's shoddily assembled insides and causing it to bounce and fire with reckless abandon.

"Watch out, Dandy!"

Steven rushed to tackle him to the ground and ideally out of the death ray dealer's sights.

"Get down, kid!

Disastrously, Dandy had the same idea. They ran into one another hard though Steven proved to be the greater force, taking himself and Dandy off their feet. Within moments of them being sent sprawling on the sand, Dandy clutched Steven close to his chest and rolled over so that the boy was between him and the ground. Panic at not being able to see was swiftly overtaken by the realization that Dandy was trying to shield him with his back. He felt something in his belly twist at the notion.

The sounds of laser gunfire were abruptly muffled, but didn't stop for a full minute. When the shooting finally died down, Steven felt Dandy loosen his hold and pull himself off of him. "You okay, Steven?" he asked as he got up to stand.

Steven took a few deep breaths before saying, "I think so."

"Great. Whew. Great…On that note, did you do this?" he asked, tapping on something solid behind him.

Steven then noticed that they were surrounded by translucent pink. "Yeah, it's…it's one of my powers," he acknowledged, bewildered that they had suddenly activated after his lack of success back at the house. "I can create shields and bubble barriers."

Dandy whistled. "Handy," he ran his fingers over the inner curvature of the bubble. It was smooth and comfortably warm to the touch. "Smart of you to throw it up when you did."

"Well you did try to protect me first."

"I'd hold off on the gratitude if I were you." Dandy warned. "From what I saw while I was covering you up, that cruddy blaster of mine just kept firing upwards and no place else."

"That's…that's good." Steven said, morbidly disappointed that the lack of actual mortal peril made their attempts at heroism largely unnecessary.

"Hey, don't get all mopey on me, dude. It still takes serious cajones to put yourself between a laser bolt and some guy you just met." Dandy was pleased to see this bit of praise chase away the beginnings of Steven's pout.

"Aw, it was nothing," he tried to say modestly. "Hey, now that your gun's stopped firing lasers, I'll get us out of here so we can continue with the tou-."

***THUNK!***

They looked up and saw that a small charred object had landed atop the roof of the dome. It slid down the force field, leaving behind a grimy streak of soot. Along the way, its form unfurled to reveal that it was in the possession of a crispily friend wing and the ashen remains of an orange beak. "What the hel-?" The came a second thud, then a third, followed by a fourth, a fifth, and so on, mostly on or around Steven's growingly useful barrier.

"Maybe you should hold off on popping your bubble, Steven. At least until it stops raining dead seagulls."

***THUNK!***

"And pelicans."

* * *

><p><em>The fall and the sudden stop was more than the string could take. Thinned and weary from a day of violent tribulation, it snapped and fell away, taking Dandy's bogus beard with it. The many glow sticks glued and tied into its fibers created a vibrant multicolored vortex as it spiraled after the grav-cuffs he had managed to slip out of. Even as he desperately clung to the edge of the plank, straining against the pull of the chains that bound his legs, Dandy still found it in himself to feel somewhat sorry to see the bedazzled prop get torn apart by the unrelenting torrential nimbuses of Planet Maelstrom. <em>

_Not so much that he wanted to share its fate though. He steeled himself for what he had to do next, grit his teeth, and used every ounce of his remaining strength to pull himself back onto the plank. His limbs scrambled to grasp at the narrow width of the platform so they could anchor the rest of his efforts to board. Alas, the weight of the chains caught up with him and he barely managed to get his chest over before further progress became impossible. He groaned upon feeling the plank's edge dig into his solar plexus, where it would remain unless he got his second wind or gave up and let go. Trapped, short of breath, he lifted his head away from the faux-mahogany he clutched on the off chance that his fortunes had changed and the guy that had pushed him over it had spontaneously combusted in the interim. The untarnished tie-dye greatcoat and the intact space pirate inside of it told him that Vlak Vart was still very much alive. He hadn't even moved, and now he was laughing at him. Dandy hated being laughed at._

"_Ohhhhh ha ha. Do excuse me, 'Glowbeard', but ay was bracing myself for Act Two of yur daring escape," he explained in his whatever-it-was accent. "To my pleasant surprise and mild disappointment, it seems like yu couldn't go all the way with it." _

"_Still…holding…on…aren't I?"_

"_Yee, but fur how much longer?" Vart's smoke-grey lips parted to flash Dandy an unfriendly, rhinestone-encrusted grin. "This hasn't been a very gud day fer yu, has it? Yu lost yur ship, yu lost yur crew, yu lost yur stupid lookin' parrot, yu lost yur weapons, yu lost the synonym swordfighting match that could've won that all back, and yu even lost that glitzy beard of yurs to the famished clouds of the thunder wurld below. Not to worry though, yu'll be joining yur phony facial hair soon enough."_

_Dandy heaved as he tried to lift himself onto the plank again._

"_Euch. Can't yu face defeat with a little murr dignity? If yu were a real pirate, yud know I've been terribly courteous. Used a tractor beam instead of torpedoes, fed yur pet some of my finest avian delicacies, and despite yur hold being devoid of treasure and yu coming here to poach aliens in MAH TERRITORY, I'm still giving yu a proper seadog's demise. Mostly cuz ay feel sorry for yu. Came here lookin' for a beastie that was long extinct. Ay should know. Ay ad the last of 'em fer dinner!" he laughed. "Additionally, it'd be cruel to run yu through and have yur former cabin bot clean up yur remains. Which reminds me, how goes the waxing, NEW CABIN BOT?!"_

"_Fine! It's going fine, Mister Vart!" QT squealed from somewhere Dandy couldn't see._

"_That's Captain Vart to yu, goldie." Vart stomped his ivory peg leg onto the deck of the Bleak Fortuity. "And yu best not forget it, lest I keelhaul yu by yur own copper wiring!"_

"_You're not going to be his captain for much longer if I can help it." Dandy groaned. His efforts had won him a few more inches. That made it a little easier to breathe and talk back to this eyesore dirtbag._

"_Again with the empty threats. Again with the rrrrrudeness." Vart tsked. "Forgiving as ay am though, I'm willing to do yu one last favor. A choice as to how yu will fall," he ran a nail along the guard of his Veebro Saber. "Ay can either walk over there and cut yur arms off with this or…" he pulled a gun on his entrapped audience, and Dandy was furious to see that it was his own. "If an ironic end is what yu desire, I could always shoot them off from here with yur own wee blaster."_

"_I'll show you a 'wee blaster', you preening privateer!" Dandy clawed in Vart's direction._

_Had Dandy not been swearing and grunting so loudly, he would've heard the faint rustle of cloth and a slight creak as Vart's peg leg took a step back. "Send you gibbering to yur doom with yur own weapon it is then." Vart carefully pointed the weapon at Dandy's reaching arms. "Farewell Glowbeard…or whatever the hell yur actual name was," he pulled the trigger. Nothing. "What the devil?"_

"_Having performance issues, MISTER Vart?"_

"_Yu dare mock me?!" Vart tossed the empty ray gun aside and unsheathed his sword, his eyes full of murder and wounded pride. "I'm Vlak Vart! The most wanted and dangerous space pirate across eight systems! Master and Commander of the Bleak Fortuity!" he started for the plank._

_Even enraged and with only one foot to his name, his steps across the platform were confident and controlled, betraying no weakness. Dandy tried to grab his ankle anyway, only to get his hand stepped on by a heavy leather boot loaded with platinum buckles. "AUGH!"_

"_Yu thought yu were gonna outsmart me? Yu thought yu were gonna beat me?!" he ground Dandy's fingers under his heel, getting another scream from the dangling deadman. "I've been doing this for hundreds of years, killing all that came after me and outliving the rest! A poofy-haired ponce and his fat vacuum? HAH!" Vart boasted as he raised his blade, ready to chop off Dandy's trapped hand at the wrist. "Yu two never stood a chance!"_

"_Three," a cold, feminine voice said from behind him._

"_Wha-?!" was as far as Vart got before he was yanked backwards by a powerful pull at the scruff of his shirt. He tried to stab at this phantom opponent, only to be flipped over and slammed onto the deck of his ship. _

_***SLAM!***_

"_That was for calling me stupid!" he heard the voice say. Then something he couldn't see picked him up by the boot and slammed him into the ground again._

_***SLAM!***_

"_That was for putting me in a cage!"_

_***SLAM!***_

"_And that!"_

_***SLAM!***_

"_And these!"_

_***SLAM!***_

"_Are for every-!"_

_***SLAM!***_

"_Single!"_

_***SLAM!***_

"_Cracker!"_

_***SLAM!***_

"_YOU SHOVED DOWN MY THROAT!"_

_***SLAM!***_

_***SLAM!***_

_***SLAM!***_

_***SLAM!***_

_***SLAM!***_

_***SLAM!***_

_***SLAM!***_

_Vart's body, which had a lot more broken bones and significantly less rhinestone teeth, slid down the mast, the floor around him perforated with face-sized craters._

"_And that last one was because I felt like it," the voice spat. _

_Dandy was really glad he hadn't blacked out from the pain or the blood rushing to his constricted legs. True, he would've died if he had, but more than that, if he had been unconscious, he wouldn't have seen one of the "most wanted and dangerous space pirates" in the galaxy get flung and smashed around his ship by an alabaster, orange-crested bluejay a fraction of his size. "That was one grade-A beatdown, matey." He weakly praised._

_The white bluejay flew towards him, shining brilliantly as Pearl morphed back into her humanoid form. "Enough with the 'matey' talk, Dandy," she demanded as she lugged him over the edge and back onto the safety of the galleon. "I think we've had more than enough of that for one day," she paused at Vart's defeated and wheezing form. Then she turned her nose with a "hmph," and carried Dandy to the main deck of the ship and away from the vanquished captain. _

"_Thanks for the save by the way." Dandy said as she laid him down near the chained up Aloha-Oe._

_A thank you? From Dandy? That was a first. "You're welco-."_

"_But now you can't deny that having you disguised as my pet pirate bird didn't end up working out in the end." Dandy interrupted. "Sure I wasn't able to use you as a dart or ninja star or emergency shiv like I thought I would, but the guy got beat. And that's what matters."_

_Ah, that was more like it. Pearl thought. "I would have trounced him sooner if you had let me from the start."_

"_I wanted to see if he knew where our alien was."_

"_And now we know that he ate it."_

"_But he knew."_

"_Just shut up and give me your hand," she gently took the damaged extremity into her palm. A thin bar of light shot out of her Gem and ran over the hand from its wrist to the tips of its fingers. "Nothing broken and he didn't break the skin. You'll get some heavy bruising, but not much else," she assured, finishing her scans._

"_There's some ice in the Aloha-Oe's freezer. I'll just put some of that on this after we cut it loose."_

"_That should do it. But let's get these chains off of you first," she wrapped her hands around one of Dandy's manacles and squeezed, breaking it apart._

"_What? No lockpick this time?"_

"_I'm in a brutal mood," she glowered as she got to work on the second cuff._

"_Got it, won't say anything…more?" Over Pearl's shoulder, Dandy saw that Vart had managed to drag himself around the mast to face their direction. His peg leg was pointing right at them and Dandy could make out that the broken fingers around its shaft were starting to press. "Pearl! Behind you!"_

_Pearl whipped her head back to assess the danger, but it was too late. As Vart's leg fired, she was able to determine that the discharge was solid, fast, pointed, and with her hands having just broken the last of Dandy's restraints, unavoidable. Nothing to do, but brace for the inevitable and hoped she survived it. There was a sickening snap. Pearl blinked. _

_Just inches from the star on her chest, Vart's ivory leg hung in the air. As confusion and gratitude at not being impaled by its wicked tip grappled within her for dominance, Pearl saw that the object hadn't stopped on its own volition as it was being held in place by a long metal arm that extended to her left and all the way up to a familiar minimalistic face._

"_Wow, I can't believe I caught that!" QT exclaimed._

"_Where the hell have you been?" Dandy demanded._

_QT drew back his arm and began rolling towards his crewmates. "I was getting more floor wax for Captain Vart. When I came back up, I saw him try to shoot you with this and I kind of just reacted," he gave the leg a little shake. "Not bad for a robot with no depth perception, huh?" QT asked, pointing to the sharpie eye patch Dandy had drawn on his face._

_Pearl giggled. "Good job, QT." she said, giving his bandana-covered head a gentle rub. "Though I have to wonder why Vart tried to hit me with this of all things. Even if he didn't know this wouldn't hurt me that much, a laser blast would've made for a more practical attack."_

"_Maybe he couldn't reach his gun." Dandy suggested._

"_Or maybe he just wanted to give you a really nasty splinter." QT joked._

_Pearl chuckled. "Oh you."_

_They all laughed._

_Then a number of pointy vicious legs burst out from the prosthetic, along with a set of slavering, gnashing pincers among a head of slick tongues as the thing writhed and lashed out in QT's hand._

_It screamed._

_The three of them also screamed._

_Then it started swearing. "Yu puss-guzzling, numb-loined, log-eyed pack of walking cavities. Ay will murder each and every one of yu!"_

"_That lack of diction…" Pearl began._

"_That barrage of piratey curses..." Dandy started._

"_AUGH!" QT shrieked. "What is this thing?!"_

"_Vart?" Pearl and Dandy asked the feral pasty insect._

"_Yeah that's me. Vlak Vart!" he twisted against QT's hold with tremendous aggression. "The Marauder of Maelstrom! The Pirate King of All Cosmos! Looter of Wurlds-!"_

"_The little centipede-looking psycho with a voice way too big for it." Dandy interrupted._

"_If you're Vart, then who was-." Pearl tore her eyes away from the cacophonic creature to where the alien it was once attached to lay. "Oh my goodness. Dandy! Look at his body."_

_Dandy obeyed and instantly regretted it. "Ugh, gross. It's all rotten and slimy looking," he gagged as the flesh on its face fell away and exposed its remaining rhinestone teeth._

"_Th-that must be how he did it. Living for centuries…" Pearl speculated. "Stealing the bodies of fellow privateers, taking over their minds, and draining them for all they're worth until he jumps into the next one," she scowled at Vart. "And you tried to do that to me?!"_

"_Would yu look at that. Bird-wench over here's got a brain after all." Vart hissed. "Would've fixed that for ya if it hadn't been for this incompetent cabin bot of mine."_

"_I'm not your cabin bot anymore, jerk!" QT shouted, earning a fresh series of zealous and unnervingly creepy escape attempts from the parasitic pirate. "Nnuaugh! Would someone please take this thing away from me?!"_

"_Hang on. Did you say thing?" Dandy asked. "You don't know what he is?"_

"_He's disgusting and horrible and gross and I hate holding him!" QT screamed._

"_Yeah, yeah, he's a morbid little bugger." Dandy agreed. "But is he registered?"_

"_I-wait." QT stood stock still as he looked through his databases. "I don't think so."_

"_Hmm. Hey Mister Vart." Dandy provoked._

"_CAPTAIN!"_

"_Whatevs. There more of you?"_

"_I'm one of a kind! Killed the rest of me kin the first chance ay got to thin out the competition." Vart boasted_

"_That true?"_

_Pearl scratched at the area around her Gem in thought. "Maybe it is, Dandy," she said, taking note of where they were; a space-worthy pirate ship of dark steel and bleak alloys the size of Beach City with only four people on it. "Those ex-crewmates of his back at the salon did tell us he tried to get rid of them so he wouldn't have to share his loot."_

"_Traitorous wretches!" Vart screeched at the mention of survivors. "After me horde, they were. Wanting all of me treasure! The leeches!"_

"_Strange words from a confessed body thief." Dandy countered. "And while we're on the subject of treasure, since we took you down and are currently holding you prisoner…I guess all the gold in your hold belongs to us now."_

"_WHAT?!" Vart yelled._

"_And with you being the last of your kind, getting you registered will make our new nest egg even larger," Dandy bragged._

"_YOU'LL NEVER GET AWAY WITH IT!"_

"_You're absolutely right. Since you've been doing this for so long, there's no way we could fit all your valuables into our ship," Dandy lamented. "Doy! What was I thinking?" he gave his forehead a playful slap. "We'll just take yours. Wow, I am really getting the hang of this pirate thing."_

"_RRRRRRGH!"_

"_C'mon Cap'n." Dandy implored. "Can't yu face yur defeat with a little murrrrrrrr dignity?"_

"_RkflrkmrfgltprkFDMNK!" Vart babbled._

_Pearl's reaction to this was much more coherent. "Take the whole ship? That seems a little much."_

"_Vart built this tub so he could use it on his own. It practically runs itself. And just think of the possibilities. All this cutting edge navigational equipment and firepower at our fingertips will make dealing with the Shatterlite a cinch." Pearl's features brightened, as they tended to do whenever Dandy seemed to take a vested interest in the monster she sought. It was time to reel her in. "And don't you want payback for all those godawful crackers he fed you?"_

_Pearl wretched at the memory of Vart's 'treats' and what she had had to do to get them out of her. "So soggy and moldy and-and-ugh! I'm in."_

"_I call shotgun." QT said. "Upgraded software, hardware, and everything else, here I come!"_

"_Fantastic. I hereby rechristen this vessel the S.S. Superfly!" Dandy beamed. "Parking it at the Alien Registration Center might be a little tricky though."_

"_I wouldn't worry about that, Glowbeard." Vart barked._

"_Why's that?"_

"_DEAD MEN PARK NO SHIPS!" he shouted, stretching out one of his many legs._

"_Hey, look over there." QT pointed to a small metal band around the miniature limb. "He's got a tiny communicator. That's kind of cute."_

"_I'll show yu cute!" Vart screamed as he pressed a button on his bracelet so hard that it cracked its surface._

_The S.S. Superfly shook._

"_What was that?" Dandy asked._

_Vart sneered. "That would be the lifeboats." The ship shuddered again. This time, the crew of the Aloha-Oe could hear a distant rumble from down below. "And there goes the first engine."_

_QT accessed the ship's network remotely to check on the engines and saw that one of them wasn't there anymore. Another of them vanished from the system. "He's blowing up the engines!"_

"_Not all of them, cabin bot." Vart said. "About half. Just enough so me old Bleak Fortuity will fall out of orbit. The other half's meant to go off once it makes landfall to make sure that anything too stupid to die from the heat of reentry, the tireless wispy dynamos they pass through, or the crash itself will be blown to smithereens along with all of Maelstrom."_

"_You're insane!" Pearl screamed._

_Vart gnashed his pincers at her. "And you're running out of engines." _

_The next explosion was strong enough to floor them. "We got to get out of here!" QT yelled. "The Aloha-Oe's our only chance!"_

"_I got it!" Pearl yelled as she ran towards the massive chains that bound the Aloha-Oe to the Bleak Fortuity. Another boom rattled the ship, but she stayed the course and got her hands around one of the man-sized links. She pulled, she clenched, and she tore. Nothing worked. "They're too tough to break!"_

_Vart snickered. "You'd have to unlock them from the central control room. If yu hurry, yu might be able to-," he started to say, but paused as a tremendous detonation sounded from behind them. "Nope. Too late."_

"_I can try cutting through them." Pearl stated, eyeing the chains closely._

"_Even if yu got me Veebro Saber, you'd never manage it, bird!" Vart claimed. "Ahahaha, isn't this grand! A funeral fitting for a Vertex Viking or a wealthy arsonist. In life, I'd never part with any of it. In death, ay never will! Not a single coin, jewel, or prize will fall to anyone else's hands! They'll burn before they do! And we're all going to burn with it! AHAHAHAHAHAHA-!"_

"_Oh would you please shut up, you grotesque little crook?!" Pearl cast out a cylinder of light from her Gem and grabbed the end of it. At her touch, there was a luminous burst, leaving behind a white spear with a long, pearlescent blade wreathed in curved, glowing steel. She slashed at one of the chain's links. Its bottom half and the links it was connected to clattered to the floor. She dashed beneath the ship and cut through the bindings on the other side, and leapt on top of the vessel to sweep away the unbound remains of the veebro iron ribbons. The Gem somersaulted off of the craft and next to one of the cable's restraining the back of the Aloha-Oe, sliced it apart, and with a spin, brought her blade to bear against its twin across the way. "QT!" she yelled, yanking the last ungrounded length of chain off of the transport. "Now!"_

"_R-right." QT stuttered. "Lowering the landing platform." _

_The bottom of the Aloha-Oe started to descend, but Pearl had all ready leapt onto it. "I'll start up the ship. Meet me at the cockpit! Hurry!" she commanded, jumping further into the ship and out of sight._

_It needn't be said that with Bleak Fortuity about to capsize into a perpetual monsoon after being repurposed as a gargantuan deathtrap with enough explosive power to end a world, Dandy and QT didn't have much time to spare. Yet even with everything shuddering and shattering all around them, there was still a window of time afforded by the lowering and raising of the platform. Just enough time for the two to look at the unyielding, unbreakable chains strewn around them and attempt to process how that had come to pass._

"_Uh," Vart murmured, equally flabbergasted. "Yu-uh-yu two know she could do that whole knife pulling out of face thing?"_

"_No." they both answered._

"_Kay." Vart was almost at a loss for words, but even captured and bewildered, he was still unwilling to break his decades-long streak of always having something to say. Baffled and dazed, he forgot to inject any bravado or malice into his next sentence. It was a sincere statement, and that might be why it cut Dandy and QT deeper than any taunt or quip. _

"_Ay wonder what else she's keepin' from the two of ya."_

**To be continued…**

Author Note: Chapter 3 at last. These just keep getting longer don't they? But that just means there's more to enjoy, right? I apologize that I overshot my deadlines for a bit. Part of it was because I didn't have access to a computer for a while, had to write a few thousand words guerrilla style on a notebook and then had to type it digitally a day or so ago. Plus the holidays were oddly busy.

Regardless, I still had fun writing this installment and I hope you guys had fun reading it. Drop a review to tell me how tickled or affronted you were by its contents, R&R, Comments and Critiques Welcome.

Chapter 4 will be shorter and come out faster, I promise. We're approaching the middle of the road, but the ride's not over yet. Stay tuned.

Hope you guys had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

btw, the square root of 36,168,196 minus 8 is 6006. Look at those numbers and think of letters. Who says Pearl doesn't have a sense of humor? Or maybe that's just spite. I dunno.


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